Ruth Sullivan

Foley Artist, Theatre Practitioner, Knitter. #Woman of a Certain Age. Also Feminist, Reader, Procrastinator. Anosmic. #sexnotgender

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

No, Mr. President. The 2020 election that you lost was not "rigged" or "dirty," handing out $1.776 billion to violent insurrectionists is not a "good idea" & reporters who ask questions about your bogus claims are not "crooked."

You are a president, not a dictator. Act like it.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@EightiesFan73 @helenstaniland Love this!!

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

Whoa...

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@LeftieStats Er, no.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

Word 💪

[ukvillafan @ukvillafan]

Being a civil-law-trained lawyer (no capitals required) does not necessarily make you a competent lawyer. Allowing ideology to cloud one’s critical faculties, as you clearly do, is anti-intellectual in the most basic way.

Your post makes a generic claim that lacks any precision, something that one might reasonably expect not to be seen from an ‘academic’. Understandably, this has already led many to ask you for clarification and I am about to add my voice to theirs.

For the sake of clarity, I am a ‘common-law-trained lawyer‘. The difference is that my training was in the UK, where I also practised for approximately 35 years as both solicitor and barrister. That’s arguing real-life cases in proper court rooms before actual judges In a common law jurisdiction.

Rather than simply add to the requests for you to clarify what you say are ‘anti-trans talking points’ and why they are allegedly ‘unreasonable’, I intend to take a different approach. Feel free, of course, to respond to those other queries too.

It is, I believe, a fair assumption that by ‘anti-trans’ you mean ‘gender critical’, or, as I prefer to term it, ‘pro-women and girls’. Your terminology is, thus, not academically dispassionate, which renders your post nothing more than incoherent polemic, deserving of nothing more than instant dismissal. However, I am going to indulge you, despite that.

The following are some core, fundamental elements of the ‘gender critical’ position. I would be grateful if you could clarify which you consider to be ‘anti-trans’ and why.

1. There are only two human sexes, male and female, defined by reference to the reproductive pathway a specific individual is organised to follow. These categories are mutually exclusive, immutable and objectively definable and observable.

2. It is thus impossible for any male human to become ‘female’ (and vice versa) as an individual’s sex is coded into the DNA at a cellular level in every nucleated cell in the body.

3. The terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not ‘gendered identities’ but sex-based descriptors for, respectively, an adult human male and female. They are akin to the terms stag and hind, stallion and mare, bull and cow, ram and ewe etc. used for other species.

4. Irrespective of whether one accepts whether the concept of ‘gender identity’ has any validity, for all Equality Act purposes, no male person can ever qualify as a woman nor a female as a man.

5. As a discrete sex-class, defined in biological terms, women are entitled to the privacy, dignity, comfort and security afforded to them by single-sex facilities that exclude ALL males, irrespective of how any individual man might ‘identify’.

6. Any man who accesses, or seeks to access, a properly constituted female single-sex facility is at least one of a coloniser, a bully, a pervert, a misogynist, an invader, a narcissist, an abuser and an oppressor. It is likely more than one of those things.

These are not fringe or “unreasonable” positions. They are grounded in biology, statute, and decades of established case law. If you consider any of them “anti-trans” or “unreasonable”, then the defect lies not in the propositions but in your own ideological capture.

The floor is yours, my friend. I look forward to your precise, point-by-point response rather than more vague hand-waving about “reasonableness”. In my 35 years in court, I learned that bluster and appeals to authority rarely survive rigorous cross-examination. I doubt yours will either.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@jk_rowling @IWF This is horrific. What this poor young woman has to deal with on a daily basis... Well, I can only imagine. How brave of her to share her story; it's important for us to read it.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@salltweets @dimorphiclife @MRobertsQLD @SenKatyG @PaulineHansonOz "this is a medical question..." jfc

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@norfolkmum1 Oh, logic 🤷

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@RachaelWongAus @amscanlon @The_Nationals Amazing news! Is the tide turning...?? 🙏🤞🙏

[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.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@Martina @RosieDuffield1 @mara_yamauchi @HelenWebberley 💯

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

#IStandWithSallGrover

Pass it on.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@theasewell05 @MaeveHalligan @BuckAngel Wow, fabulous 💪

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@hothingsgirlsay Bravo 🙌

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@OliverKamm Oh wow. I'm no expert but I have often cited her as an excellent translator and interpreter of some extraordinary books, none of which I would have read if it wasn't for her.

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@Chesschick01 Off of, though...?! 🤭
#sorrynotsorry

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@BradfemlyWalsh It's brilliant. I still have two more episodes left - it's a hard watch so I'm rationing it 😎

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@BluskyeAllison @SexMattersOrg Fantastic! 🤩

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

@bindelj @betsvigi9 Yes! 💪

[Ruth Sullivan @rubyrocks76]

I've just voted 💪
Despite our current political turbulence it still gives me a thrill to put a ✅ in the box. The polling station volunteers are always so friendly and I always leave with a smile on my face. Yay 😊