Kate Webb

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@RAC_Care my parents have been waiting for recovery for 24 hours now. They have been stuck in 35+ degree heat with 2 dogs. My father has multiple health conditions and is at extreme risk. They have been messed around and fobbed off all day. Could someone please contact me ASAP

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

I've written about what I did in Manchester last Thursday. Please share widely - it's in front of paywall. https://t.co/AYgwumqetb

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Gender critical is just this:

🐌 : hello butterfly, I’m a butterfly as well.
🦋 : no, snail, you are a snail.
🐌 : I am a butterfly
🦋 : you’ve got a shell
🐌 : it’s a butterfly shell.
🦋: and no wings
🐌 : stop genociding me.

[Bruce Bowman @boswelltoday]

As Sandie Peggie returns to the witness stand for the final time, I’ve taken a moment to gather some final thoughts. My last update from the tribunal will be out this afternoon - but in the meantime, here is one I prepared earlier.

The Case That Spoke Too Plainly🧱

I won’t be tweeting the closing submissions. There is little left to say that the tribunal has not, in one way or another, already exposed.

For nearly a year I’ve followed the Peggie case - day by day, witness by witness - as a nurse of thirty years stood accused of harassment for objecting to a male colleague in the women’s changing room. She did not shout. She did not use slurs. She simply said: you are not a woman. You should not be here. For that, she was suspended. Investigated. Humiliated. And made to wait while the institution responsible for that humiliation told the public it was “balancing rights.”

What emerged, over weeks of hearings and months of delay, was not a case of misconduct, but a case of institutional self-deception. One by one, managers, HR advisors, equality officers took the stand. What they revealed - unintentionally, but unmistakably - was that @nhsfife had no serious grasp of what its policies were doing to women like Sandie Peggie. No one had assessed the risks. No one had thought about menstruation, trauma, dignity, consent. The witnesses admitted as much. “We didn’t ask,” they said. “We followed guidance.” “There was no policy.” “It wasn’t our role.”

That was the pattern. Not bad people; timid ones. Bureaucrats trained to prioritise reputational safety over moral courage. Time and again, they deferred upwards: to Once for Scotland, to Equality and Diversity, to how the other boards were doing it. They could not say why Peggie was suspended - only that it had seemed “safer” than not suspending her. They could not say what she’d done wrong - only that she hadn’t accepted a man in the women’s space.

Her view - that sex is real and that sex matters - was not protected in practice. It was pathologised. NHS Fife could not bring itself to call it what the law now requires: a legitimate belief.

And it wasn’t just the managers. The junior doctor at the heart of this, Dr. Upton, sat in the witness box and calmly described himself as a woman, entitled to strip and change beside female colleagues. He had, he told the court, taken notes on Sandie Peggie from day one. He knew she was uncomfortable. He did not leave. He stayed. And when she said “I don’t believe you belong here,” he called it a hate incident.

He wasn’t asked to compromise. She was told to move wards.

Covering this case has clarified something I already suspected. The erosion of women’s boundaries is not always driven by ideology. Often, it is driven by indifference - by men who want access and by organisations too cowardly to say no. The effect, of course, is the same.

I’ve reported what happened. I’ve watched the language bend and buckle under the strain of unspoken truths. I’ve listened to professionals - nurses, consultants, executives - swallow their instincts because their job demands belief in something they know isn’t true; and I’ve watched what happens when one woman refuses.

There is nothing exceptional about Sandie Peggie. That is precisely the point. She is what any of us might become, in any workplace, when we say aloud what everyone sees.

The case has been widely reported; the spending scrutinised; the reputations preserved. What’s missing is the story that matters - the one that lives in the transcripts, in the contradictions, in the silences. That’s where the truth sits - in the record, not the narrative.

This was a landmark case. Not because the law changed, but because the lie did not hold.

We’ll see what the judgment says. But I already know what I’ve seen. And if you’ve followed this thread - I hope you agree.

Thank you to everyone who has read, shared, and followed along. I’m extremely grateful for your company.🙏

Good luck, Sandie @nicoleepeggiee

[Dr Rachel Clarke @doctor_oxford]

Today the Observer has published an extraordinary piece, which I think they view as a romantic case for assisted dying, but which is, in fact, a textbook case of how doctors subvert the rules to help patients without any terminal illness whatsoever to die by suicide.

It could not highlight more starkly the dangers of the law we are currently debating.

In the piece, doctors in New South Wales (whose AD law is very similar to our proposed one) collude with two elderly people with no terminal diagnoses to end their lives.

One person has generative spinal discs, her husband has panic attacks. They are both very old and wish to die,

No terminal condition. No expectation of death within 6 months.

Yet they found two doctors only too happy to sign off their double suicide & prescribe the lethal drugs.

We may all yearn to “slip away in a room full of love” at the end of our lives - I know I do - but enabling state sponsored suicide under the guise of assisted dying couldn’t be more obviously dangerous.

The Observer has just revealed how an apparently safe law in Australia is really used, in the real world, to enable suicide. The doctors were entirely happy to ignore the “terminal illness with 6 months or less to live” requirement. And the family of the dead couple are so confident this is all OK that they wrote about it in a UK newspaper.

It’s dystopian, dishonest & so deeply worrying.

Please let’s not sleepwalk into this in the UK.

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@Docstockk Chapeau

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

It seems literally impossible for certain trans activists to grasp that not everything is about them.

The only rape crisis centre in Edinburgh prior to the opening of Beira’s Place was run by a trans-identified man who publicly told potential service-users they would be ‘challenged on their bigotry’ if they didn’t agree he was a woman. Meanwhile a ‘non-binary’ man subsequently convicted of rape, and found by the sentencing judge to harbour serious hostility towards women, was permitted to access the centre’s services.

Trans-identified men in Edinburgh were better served than women when it came to accessing support after rape or sexual assault. Beira’s Place, which I founded and fund in its entirety, gives women a choice. The female-led, female-centred model of support is provably preferred by most female survivors. We know for a fact that some of our service-users didn’t seek help before we opened, because they didn’t want a male providing their therapy, or for men to be accessing what they needed to feel was a completely safe space. However, if a woman was happy with a male support worker, or with males also using the service, she could of course choose the alternative rape crisis centre.

Some men, trans-identified and not, disagree that even the most vulnerable and traumatised women should be allowed to exclude men from rape crisis centres, yet many women see a male-free space and service as the last or only chance of putting their lives back together. It takes immense courage even to pick up the phone to access help after rape. Yet, even at their worst moment, these women told by activists like Willoughby that their priority should be centering his feelings, pandering to his ‘identity’ and pretending that they don’t recognise his narcissism and aggression as a quintessentially male response to not being given what he wants, by women.

The simple truth is that no decent male, however they identify, would ever seek to breach the boundaries of women whose sense of self and safety has been shattered by their experience of male violence or rape. 98% of sexual predators are male. 88% of sexual crime victims are female. Beira’s Place exists because I saw an unmet need and the fact that we’ve been so busy since we’ve opened proves, not that women hate trans-identified men, but that this is where women feel safe enough to deal with trauma they might otherwise have had to carry with them forever.

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@HJoyceGender I am going to print this out and take it to work with me, every time someone tells me to be kind I will give them a copy and ask them if this is the world they want to live in. This letter is a massive, massive own goal - it needs to be publicised far and wide

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@HelenWebberley But history will look kindly on male rapists being housed in the female prison estate because of an unfalsifiable belief in “gender identity”…when sex matters, biology counts. As a doctor you should know this. Shame on you.

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@jo_bartosch What are all those men doing just standing by letting a woman be abused in public like that?? He’s sickening, but their tolerance of that behaviour towards *anyone* is part of a bigger problem too.

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

Are you safe from Duo this year? #Duolingo365

[Ross Tucker @Scienceofsport]

Podcast SPECIAL. If you’ve just watched the women’s boxing disgrace at #Paris2024, and are wondering “how did we get here?”, this podcast is for you. We explore and explain the IOC’s disregard for safety and fairness for women in sport. Appalling misogyny https://t.co/FG9fX9p7ik

[Zachary Elliott @zaelefty]

The International Boxing Association tested him and showed he has XY chromosomes. It looks like he might be male with a DSD like 5-ARD or similar, which does not affect T production or reception, so his body still benefits from the performance advantage conferred by T reception from the testes through development.

But we can’t know for sure what DSD this is because it looks like the details are confidential.

And also, is a DSD even involved at all? Is he just a typical male? The IBA said he doesn’t pass because he has XY chromosomes, but that’s all we know as far as I’m aware.

Either way, this is a horrible injustice against Angela Carini, the female boxer in this fight.

[The Countess @TheCountessIE]

#AngelaCarini is a hero and a winner, and a role model for women athletes. The sporting world can be very proud of this woman for her bravery in standing up for safety and fairness in women’s sport. #WeStandWithAngelaCarini #Olympics A champion for women’s sports.

[Sonya Douglas @SonyaDouglas]

The Taliban are raping women and girls they arrest for ‘bad hijab’, but the @UN has assured them no Afghan women will participate and women’s rights will not be discussed at the conference in Doha on 30/6

How nice for the boys @UNWomen

#WhatIsMisogyny https://t.co/SXdIaTirsg

[Maya Forstater @MForstater]

Some things are more important than being nice. Telling the truth is one of them.

https://t.co/OyGLj4eEF7

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@TheAnfieldWrap Mascherano

[Kate Webb @kizzmit]

@PilgrimTucker This sounds a lot like me