Harlequin Duck

Gender supercritical. Science teacher. Progressive lefty atheist.

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@sappholives83 @Glinner That's really good.

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@Quiteanappetite @tombennett71 @researchEDScot1 I taught in England and now teach in Scotland. I am not at all surprised that Tom draws attention to a near neighbour that gets so much so very wrong. If I could click my fingers and introduce the English education system in Scotland I would do it immediately.

[Tom Bennett OBE @tombennett71]

Listen to the hurt and frustration in this teacher’s voice. Because she works in a system that asks her to manage the behaviour of the complex sea of humanity with no tools or systems to keep safety, dignity and order. Because the default mechanism she’s allowed to use to respond to disruption is a restorative chat and little else.

[Jordi Martí @xarxatic]

Hemos llegado a un punto absurdo. Y se trata del "derecho" de un alumno a reventar la clase sistemáticamente está por encima del derecho de los otros 29 a recibir una educación digna. Hemos confundido la inclusión con permitir que el aula sea un campo de batalla. 🧵va...

[Kathleen Stock @Docstockk]

Remember the rules- if you're head of clinic or on the board of NHS commissioning programme, you can give interviews slagging off gender critics, tweet gender identity propaganda all day long, be draped in flags, it's all fine. If you disagree, you have to be silent as grave.

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

This is a particularly pleasing point in the Darlington Nurses judgment. Legally sound advice from @fairplaywomen was rejected because FPFW is "gender-critical". Instead the hospital listened to unlawful advice from trans lobby groups and also orgs like NHS Confed. Bad call!

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

'He has a point, but he's too blunt.'

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.

Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?'

As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist.

Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

Trans issues create a zone of blatant epistemic corruption in every domain it touches -- in politics, education, media, science, medicine, and the law.

When you tell people that their moral worth hinges on affirming a falsehood and they believe it, the collapse of basic normative truth-certifying standards and practices is instantaneous and total.

[Helen Nettleship @Nettleshippy]

2015 Germaine Greer “ Transgender women are not women”

(you’re cancelled, bigot)

2025 The Supreme Court “ Transgender women are not women”

10 years

Everyone should have just listened to Greer https://t.co/KgoQQwRjhy

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Winners in the UK Supreme Court today:

Women and girls, including trans-identified women (continue to benefit from maternity rights etc)
Gay people
Freedom of speech
Freedom of association
Those at risk of discrimination for a belief in the material reality of sex.

1/2

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

The Guardian ⁦@guardian⁩ should be stupidly embarrassed by this article. https://t.co/6GR6G5Fm8s

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@orioldemarcos @BernoulliDefect Milk is subsidised in the UK, accounting for some (not all) of the difference. Supermarkets also use dairy milk as a loss leader.

[Obadiah Mbatang @residentadviser]

Streeting is very good here. Whittome has become an extremist and crank on this issue, and favours medical experimentation of children (likely to be autistic and gay). That’s the reality here.

[TransgenderTrend @Transgendertrd]

On Tuesday & Wednesday next week the Supreme Court will consider what the word 'woman' means for the purposes of the Equality Act.

Our friends @ForWomenScot have brought the case, a culmination of years of activism by women to protect women & girls 👏👏

https://t.co/2Qs6OCa5Pe

[Ani O'Brien @aniobrien]

@TheTweetOfGod Or you could stop making people “in the wrong body”?

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@sbkaufman How bizzarre! Surely this kind of study requires absolute clarity on what 'gender' means. The worst kind of fuzzy thinking on display here.

I notice that one participant was excluded for not answering the gender identity question. Surprised it was only one.

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@TomCadwallender Gorgeous

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@LisaMarieKlaass @jk_rowling Yes, and the only people who use it are people I am happy to allow into it. That's the point. Plenty of gender neutral toilets are not single-enclosed- cubicle and all of them allow *literally anyone* in, where you or I want to share a space with them or not.

[Harlequin Duck @Shelducks8]

@LisaMarieKlaass @jk_rowling They are talking about public 'gender-neutral' bathrooms, which often take the form of individual cubicles and a shared handwashing area. And they are deliberately pretending to believe that JKR has a problem with any bathroom that both sexes might use, which is silly.