Michelle

Particle physics degree on its way. For the first time I don't mind having red hair! Swears like a sailor who ran out of handcream. Gets shit faced on irnbru!🏴

[GB News @GBNEWS]

Lib Dem MP left 'frustrated' at plans to house asylum seekers in small Bicester community: 'It's inappropriate!'

https://t.co/J1r9GaLHnW

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 𝙱𝙴𝙰𝚁 🇬🇧 @RangersBear55]

@GBNEWS Ah, so the Lib Dems claim 'refugees' are welcome, just not so much when they're housed near them.

Got it.

[Michelle @shellbellerina]

@Keir_Starmer You've a nerve feeling upset and betrayed!You stabbed @jeremycorbyn in the back without a backward glance,and deprived this country of a decent,honest man as Prime Minister, good riddance may you never show your face in politics again! From a lifetime labour supporter, until you!

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

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

So I’ve briefly mentioned that I had a male friend in high school who came out as a girl and a lesbian, but I’ve never really talked about it in detail because it’s not really a great memory, and I’d actually kind of buried most of it, because it’s all sort of unpleasant and made me uncomfortable at the time, but I was thinking about it earlier so here you go.

John was one of those guys who always wants to touch you: to rub your arm or your back, or to give you a long, tight hug every time you saw him, and whenever you or he left. He liked to give compliments, too, but not the kind of compliment you wanted to get. Too florid, too flirty, too pushy.

Over the course of three years, he’d asked out every girl in our group of friends, and quite a few girls outside of it, without much luck. He was handsy and clingy, and he made most girls slightly uncomfortable, but it was the 90s, and behavior that would be seen as toxic today was just normal guy stuff back then.

When he came out, everyone was surprised. We all thought that since he was a “girl” now, he was actually into other boys, and that the desperate flirting had just been a cover. Us girls decided that we would be welcoming and supportive, and we didn’t complain when the school said he could use the girls’ bathroom and locker room.

For three weeks, everything was okay. Then John tried to kiss one of my lesbian friends. He told her he was a lesbian too, and that he liked her. She’d already turned him down, and she reminded him of that, but he pointed out that he was a girl now. She told him it wasn’t about his gender, she just didn’t like him that way, and to his credit he did drop it there — but that wasn’t the only problem.

While my straight female classmates were willing to share space with actual lesbians, and we were all willing to share space with John when we’d thought he was gay, finding out that he was attracted to girls, and remembering that he’d been in the locker room as we changed clothes, started a huge uproar.

Pretty much everyone was upset and wanted John banned from our spaces, so we made up a petition and took it to the head of school. And because this was the 90s, we were actually taken seriously, and John was given his own spaces to change in.

These days, girls have no spaces of their own in which to escape from boys like John. They go through the day holding their pee because they don’t feel safe in the girls’ room anymore, or get detention for refusing to change for gym. They can’t excuse themselves to the bathroom if a guy like John is being too flirty, too handsy, too pushy - and they can’t even say “no thanks, I’m a lesbian” unless they want to be accused of bigotry. It’s an appalling state of affairs, and it’s time we put a stop to it.

[Winston Belvedere @WinstonBelvede1]

But apparently I’m far right for opposing this.

Is that right @Keir_Starmer?

[Pauline Savery @PaulineSavery]

@Slatzism @reduxx It doesn't matter if they are 'real transwomen' or not, they are biologically men and should not have access to womens spaces based on their gender feelings.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

On June 4, 1913, Emily Wilding Davison walked onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby. She reached up toward the King's horse, Anmer—and was struck at full gallop. She died four days later, skull fractured, never regaining consciousness.

Was she trying to pull down the horse? Attach a suffrage scarf to its bridle? Or simply create such a disruption that the world could no longer ignore the women demanding the vote? We will never know for certain. What we do know: a woman in her forties, well-educated, a First Class honours graduate from Oxford, threw her body into the path of royal hooves. For a cause.

The establishment called her mad. Newspapers mocked her as a hysterical fanatic. But her funeral turned London into a funeral procession of 5,000 suffragettes, white dresses, purple banners, and silent rage. She had already been force-fed 49 times in prison. She had hidden overnight in a broom cupboard inside the House of Commons so she could legally list Parliament as her address. She was no impulsive martyr. She was a strategist in combat boots.

The question still haunts us: was it suicide? Her ticket that day was a round-trip. She had plans for a speaking tour in America. Most historians now believe she intended to attach a flag, not to die. But intention matters less than impact.

Emily Davison became a symbol—fierce, uncomfortable, and necessary. The vote came in 1928, equal to men. She never saw it. But she understood that sometimes progress requires a body on the track. Not madness. Memory.

© Women In World History

#drthehistories

[Angie Jones @angijones]

A woman with bright purple hair came in to my work today. She would have blended with the TQIA+ community but I still complimented her on her choice of hair colour and pointed out the tone was one of the suffragette colours. She told me she has been teaching her daughter about the Suffragettes and other feminist women and then asked me if I knew women’s rights were under threat and had I heard of a case called Tickle versus Giggle? I said I had, that I found the fact Tickle won despicable, and she launched in to a 10 minute rant about self ID and her disgust with Labor and the Greens, who she used to vote for. I didn’t say anything, just let her vent. Then I invited her to our rally on the 4th of July.
I work in a tiny satellite town an hour from Melbourne.
If gender ideology has women riled up out here then TERFs have won in the court of public opinion. If Labor wants any chance of staying in government, or if the Libs or One Nation want a crack, they better give women our rights back!

[Wales-Women’s Rights Network 💜🤍💚🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @WRNWales]

Nurses were subjected to this horror and made to watch this man masturbate.

And the state of this report 👇- as the @barrydistrict news refer to this man as a ‘woman’ and utter the ridiculously offensive words ‘her penis’. 🤡

https://t.co/9PDqjOf2Mo

[Lily Maynard @LilyLilyMaynard]

“Staff could see that she had her penis in her hand and that her hand was moving up and down.”

Shame on anyone who is such a cowardly POS they’ll pretend a man wanking in public is a woman

https://t.co/qnoIXLBkK1

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

@jan_murray @barrydistrict This is so bloody unspeakably ridiculous. Everyone with eyes can see this is a sick old man with a joke of a wig on his idiot head. The infinite stupidity and woman-hate of calling this fool a 'she' when not a single actual woman has ever behaved like this... #NotOurCrimes

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

The assisted suicide Bill is a dangerous mess of a Bill, with fewer safeguards than when it began. If the exact same shambles is revived, it will face strong opposition.

Labour MP Lauren Edwards to reintroduce assisted suicide Bill
https://t.co/Nd2c4FT45N

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

"Protect the Dolls";
"Most marginalised community"; "Vulnerable".

Open your eyes.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

Stories like this make me think that somewhere along the line, I actually died and went to hell. How did so many of my old colleagues and friends stand for this man against their own daughters? How could they happily see my career destroyed on his behalf?

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

Dear Lush (cc Chelmsford City Council),

As a woman who had half a breast removed last year due to cancer, I am writing to raise my concerns about your “Proud of My Stripes” window display.

I am also, on behalf of other women who have experienced breast cancer, respectfully requesting its removal.

Because mastectomies are not a fashion statement, an identity marker or something to be celebrated.

They are something women undergo because they are ill, because they are frightened, because they are trying to stay alive.

Around 59,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK every year. Many will undergo surgery - a mastectomy, lumpectomy or other procedure.

Others choose preventive mastectomies because they carry a high-risk BRCA gene mutation.

If a woman chooses to have her breasts removed to affirm a gender identity, that is her personal choice.

I honestly don’t know the number of women who have elective mastectomies for this reason.

What I do know is that it is a tiny number compared with those for whom breast surgery is medically necessary and not something to be celebrated.

I think I speak for many women who have experienced breast cancer - and for their families - when I say this:

Breast removal surgery is not something I regard as cute, playful or empowering.

Nor is it something I believe retailers should be celebrating.

For that reason, I am requesting that the display be removed and that @ChelmsCouncil apologise for promoting it on social media.

Yours sincerely,

Janet Murray

[Karina @MatkaTerf]

🚨Nottingham!
Are you or your daughters planning to Victoria Centre this Sat 13th June?

Beware that a group of men in dresses are planning a mass "piss-in" in the Ladies toilets & using female changing rooms.

These are some of the men we can expect to see entering the Ladies. Please share!

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

This fear tactic has been used for millennia. It’s exactly the same reason women leave bathrooms & changing rooms (& try to become small or invisible) when males invade their intimate spaces. Speak out. Or our voices will be lost & our daughters & granddaughters will pay the price in the lost of those valued safeguards & sports

[Freyja1 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇸🇯🇩🇪🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @FreyjaBakke]

Peter Selby had 125,000 child abuse images on his devices.

2,413 category A. Children as young as three. Extreme pornography including bestiality.

He avoided jail. The judge said prison would be difficult because he identifies as transgender.

Nine months later he breached his court order. Downloaded VPN software to hide his internet activity. Avoided jail again. Judge said he'd be at risk in a male prison.

Peter Selby. 71. South Shields. Ladysmith Street.

Currently living less than a mile from a primary school and a nursery. Near a public park where children play.

Two court appearances. Two suspended sentences. 125,000 images.

Still in your community.
Preditor awareness

[Lynnbeachbum @lynnluvsbeach]

@sappholives83 It’s time we learned what really going on folks. Read this.