Helen Langton

ODP, Clinical Research Delivery Lead - Views my own

[Naomi Cunningham @LoudBonnet]

This is direct discrimination against women. Any woman who uses these facilities has a potential claim. See https://t.co/QgUhnNNLXy for detail on how to tackle this.

[Jade Blue @jadeblueLDN]

A rape case was dropped 13 days before trial.

Years later, an independent review found it should have gone ahead.

But by then, it was too late.

Here's why that matters.

A woman reported a rape.

Three and a half years later, she was preparing for trial.

Then the CPS dropped the case.

The reason? A sexsomnia defence.

The case would never be heard by a jury.

Most people thought that was the end.

It wasn't.

She requested a Victim's Right to Review.

An independent Chief Crown Prosecutor reviewed the decision.

The conclusion was extraordinary.

The case should never have been dropped.

In fact, the review found it was more likely than not that a jury would have convicted.

But there was a devastating problem.

The CPS had already offered no evidence in court.

Double jeopardy meant the case could never be reopened.

The decision was found to be wrong.

The outcome could not be changed.

So she sued the CPS.

The CPS apologised.

They paid damages.

They changed policy.

And today, there is a pilot scheme that gives victims an option for a review before rape cases are dropped.

That woman was me.

My case can't be put back before a jury.

But others shouldn't have to hear that a case should have gone to trial only after it's too late to do anything about it.

That's why I'm campaigning for victims to have a review before cases are dropped.

And for the current pilot to become permanent.

Not after.

When it's too late.

#RightToBeReviewed #VictimsRights #JusticeMatters

[Jennifer Sey @JenniferSey]

A boy just won the West Virginia state championship in girls' shot put.

The @ACLU argued in front of the Supreme Court that that boy has no physical advantage vs girls. He just wants to play with his friends on the girls' team. It's all about fun and inclusion, you see.

[Mara Yamauchi @mara_yamauchi]

At least 9 males ran in the Female category in UK parkrun on Sat 23 May.

Two got top in age category.

One man got 1st Female. In 2nd place was a girl and in 3rd place was a little girl. These two girls had 1st and 2nd stolen from them by a man, all facilitated by parkrun….

[XX-XY Athletics @xx_xyathletics]

Look at her.

[Coach @rowinggeek]

I can confirm that there are many Oxford student rowers and coaches who are appalled at this. The bullying tactics of the trans lobby have effectively silenced anyone who knows that biology is real. Coaches have stayed out of it because they want to keep their jobs (most are employed on short-term contracts and there are few job opportunities especially if word gets round that you’re a ‘troublemaker’). Just look at Cambridge where the women who founded the Cambridge University Women’s Society have been subjected to horrendous abuse and threats and you can see the fear is real.

[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.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

Do you want to know what the women called TERF’s believe?

Buckle up. Here it is:

Women are adult human females.
Men are adult human males.
No man is a woman.
Woman, man, boy, girl, female, male are all sex based terms.
No human being has or can change sex.
Femininity and masculinity are socially created and imposed.
Being feminine is not a condition of being female.
Being masculine is not required to be male.
Men and boys can be feminine.
Women and girls can be masculine.
"Transwomen" are men.
Lesbians are women who are sexually attracted to other women.
Gay men are men sexually attracted to other men.
Legal sex just means a man has changed his identity documents to claim to be a woman.
Gender ideology is bullshit.
No child is born in the wrong body.
Puberty blockers and cross sex hormones are sterilisation of primarily homosexual or autistic youth.
"Trans" isn’t a coherent demographic of people.
"Trans" is a man made concept.
Safeguarding of women’s boundaries is important.
Safeguarding children is paramount.
Female spaces are necessary.
No males in female sport.
When we say female, we’re saying it to reference both women and girls. Otherwise, we’ll be specific about women or girls.
Nonbinary is the equivalent of emo or goth, it’s a phase and doesn’t deserve or warrant legislative validation.
Females are oppressed on the basis of being female, aka sex. Don’t believe us? Look to women in Afghanistan.
While males are also entitled to male only spaces, they’re very different in society and law to female spaces.
Women’s rights matter.

From the full episode of TERF TV episode 1.4

[Maeve Halligan @MaeveHalligan]

"The fact of the matter is: the more kids are trans, the more money she makes."

I spoke to @piersmorgan about my recent speech at the Cambridge Union. There are people profiting from trans ideology - people who must be called out.

[Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 @babybeginner]

Omg. Omg. Omg. Chills!!!! She did it AGAIN!!!

Oh to live on the island!!!! I want to live on the island!!!!

I love @JenniferSey !! I really do. (The funniest thing is I’m wearing one of their hats right now! 😂😂😂)

[Mara Yamauchi @mara_yamauchi]

Won’t someone think of the poor men who sell their daughters to be raped so that their sons get enough food. This is repulsive, even by BBC standards.

[Kirralie Smith @KirralieS]

This time next week (Monday 25th May), I will be sitting in a court room in the NSW Supreme Court because I identified two males in female sport.

As a result of three years of lawfare I was found guilty of vilification and ordered to pay $95,000 in damages as well as make contradictory social media posts.

I am appealing that decision.

Nothing in this world can make me believe they are women.

Nothing in this world can make me believe they deserve a place in women's sport.

Nothing in this world will give me confidence in the courts after @salltweets lost her federal court appeal.

Men are not women. Gaslighting us, penalizing us, threatening us will not change that fact!

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

Bravo to my colleague @nickwallis for getting a story like this on the cover of one of the most widely read Sunday supplements. Out this weekend.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

I am absolutely devastated
Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia.
It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us.

But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow & men will still not be women.

[Stephanie Bastiaan @stephbastiaan]

The Full Federal Court has handed down its judgement in Giggle v Tickle.

In a shock to women across the country - Sall Grover not only lost her appeal, the Court set aside the original finding of indirect discrimination and replaced it with direct discrimination, upholding Tickle's cross-appeal.

The damages were doubled from $10,000 to $20,000.

It’s important to note the Court expressly said it was only applying the Sex Discrimination Act as it is written- it is "not empowered to give effect to its own view" about whether that law is desirable.

In 2013, @JuliaGillard’s @AustralianLabor government amended the Sex Discrimination Act- stripping the meaning out of "man" and "woman" and adding gender identity as a protected attribute to be pitted against biological sex.

Today's outcome is proof of what those amendments have done: women are left with no meaningful rights or recognition under the Sex Discrimination Act - a bitter irony, given that protecting women was the very purpose of the Act under our commitment to CEDAW.

In my opinion, this is a verdict on the law, not on Sall. The judges found that the law - as that government amended it - left them no other conclusion.

These amendments must be repealed.
The Sex Discrimination Act must once again recognise biological reality and protect women's right to single-sex spaces.

What a dark and devastating day for Australian women and girls.

#RepealTheSDA2013 #IStandWithSallGrover
#GigglevTickle
#Auspol

[Natasha @Natasha_etc_]

Having now read the judgment in full, I suspect some institutions may find their current policy positions considerably more unsettling than they presently appreciate – not least because of the financial exposure they may have unwittingly created for themselves.

This is not merely because the Tribunal found malicious intent. It did not. Quite the opposite.

The judgment accepts that the employer’s aims were likely motivated by inclusion, dignity, and a belief that they were acting lawfully. But the Tribunal draws a sharp distinction between intent and effect.

In essence: your aims may be considered noble by some, but good intentions do not absolve liability. Nor do they remove the obligation to consider the rights of all, rather than simply the group currently most institutionally fashionable.

The Tribunal effectively says: you may genuinely believe your policy is compassionate and progressive. You may have relied upon external guidance. You may have acted without animus.

But if the practical operation of that policy creates a hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment for another protected group, benevolent intent does not rescue it. Saying stonewall told me I had to is not a magic shield.

Indeed, one passages states:

“reliance on contemporaneous guidance or good practice advice cannot justify an incorrect interpretation of the law. Employers must seek their own legal advice and ensure that they are applying the law correctly.”

That paragraph alone should cause many organisations to pause, think, and potentially re-evaluate their position.

For years, institutions have increasingly treated external guidance, internal social consensus, and reputational anxiety as though they were substitutes for statutory interpretation.

The judgment also rejects the increasingly fashionable institutional proposition that objections themselves are inherently irrational, malicious, or fringe. The claimant was found not to be “hypersensitive” for her objection. Nor did the Tribunal treat the claimant’s policy disagreement as evidence of hatred.

In addition, the tribunal also addressed enforcement of legally compliant policies:

“We accept that it would not be possible for the respondent to guarantee that the single-sex toilets would only be accessed by women. However, this does not mean that the respondent could not take reasonable steps to ensure that such a policy was complied with by its employees and visitors, for example by making it a disciplinary offence to breach any employee policy or by requiring visitors to comply with appropriate policies.”

For years, many organisations have behaved as though imperfect enforceability extinguishes the legitimacy of single-sex provision altogether, and therefore absolves them of obligations towards the women who work for them. The Tribunal rejected that proposition.

And perhaps most significantly of all, the judgment expressly states:

“there is no express legal right for a transgender person to use the single-sex facilities of their gender identity under the Act or under the Workplace Regulations.”

That is a profoundly important conclusion because it directly challenges the common institutional assumption that identity-based access was a settled legal entitlement. It never was. This was established in FWS, yet the myth is still proving difficult to dispel.

This judgment is, in effect, a warning that guidance, aspiration, and law are not the same thing.

For a long time, many institutions attempted to dissolve these tensions rhetorically – by insisting that safeguarding concerns, privacy objections, religious modesty concerns, and sex-based boundaries were either irrational or merely pretexts for animus.

Whilst this judgment is not binding, I hope organisations take heed of the warnings it offers. If they continue to ostrich, they may well regret it – as it may prove a financial exposure they failed to budget for.

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

This judgment should send shockwaves through NHS and beyond. It is to my knowledge the 1st to decide that allowing trans identifying men into women's workplace facilities is in itself discrimination and harassment against women.

[Maya Forstater @MForstater]

📣 @FayeRCTribunal who has won her case against NHS England!

Congratulations to Naomi Cunningham and Liz McGlone representing 👏👏👏

Tribunal finds the policy of permitting "trans women" to use female facilities was harassment in relation to sex & GC belief and its trans equality proceedure was harassment in relation to GC belief.

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

Let's all send @salltweets all the love and gratitude for fighting this. And 🙏🙏🙏
https://t.co/vXqFnAHNya

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HALF A MILLION PEOPLE WERE DEFRAUDED

Imagine you are behind on your store card payments. You are already struggling. Then the bank quietly adds an extra charge on top of what you owe. Not because it costs them that much. Just because .. they can. And because they think nobody is watching.

Someone was watching.

Nicholas Wilson was a debt recovery lawyer. He goes by Mr Ethical @nw_nicholas on X. His old boss meant it as an insult. In 2003 he noticed that @HSBC subsidiary HFC Bank was adding an illegal 16.4% charge onto the debts of people who were already in financial trouble.

Store cards from John Lewis, Currys, B&Q, Dixons, PC World. Ordinary people. Struggling people. Being quietly robbed.

He told his boss it was illegal. His boss started calling him "Mr Ethical" as a joke. Then they sacked him.

He reported it to the regulators. @TheFCA ignored him for years.

When a researcher separately wrote to both HSBC and the FCA asking about the fraud...

... both wrote back with responses in the exact same wording, same punctuation, same paragraphs. The bank and the regulator were sharing the same script.

FCA's own independent Complaints Commissioner eventually investigated. He called it the worst case of regulatory failure he had ever dealt with.

FCA's response was to appoint Ruth Kelly, an HSBC director, and Baroness Hogg from John Lewis, onto its own board. The two people they were supposed to be investigating were now sitting inside the regulator.

You actually cannot make this up.

After 13 years of Wilson refusing to go away, HSBC quietly agreed to pay some money back. FCA announced 6,700 victims.

Wilson says the real number is closer to 500,000. HSBC has now set aside £223 million for repayments. No fine. No criminal charges. No one went to prison. No one was even publicly named.

Wilson has spent the last 20 years unemployable. Blacklisted. Living on state benefits. Fighting to keep his home. Someone even anonymously reported him to the DWP for benefit fraud while the actual billion pound fraud went unpunished.

The bank that robbed half a million people kept its licence.

The man who caught them lost everything.

Source: @guardian | @BBC | @PrivateEyeNews | @SundayMirror | @realmediauk | nicholaswilson com | @nw_nicholas and others.