So assuming that this Parliament will do nothing to change the GRA or EA to change the law we'll now have at least 3-4 years to live under the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law.
The Cyclefree position is that this will make women safer. I think it will make women less safe with the added disadvantage of making trans people less safe as well. Are there any datasets we can look at over the next few years to determine which one of us is right?
You’ll probably both find statistics to support your position. It will probably be impossible to distinguish from other effects.
Probably right. That's the case with many things.
Something I'd like to see covered (and it never seems to be) is how other countries handle this issue of the legal sex of transgender people and their inclusion (or not) in women's spaces.
I could be wrong but my impression is we are making a particular meal of it. If so, why is that?
On topic anyone and everyone is entitled to disagree with a SC decision. That’s called democracy. To give an example the SC made a terrible decision a few years ago now that completely screwed up our law on prescription. An Act of Parliament and several other SC decisions later the law is nowhere near as satisfactory as it had been for decades before that decision. I have no problem saying that as an advocate and officer of the court.
I would even defend the right of people in general to ascribe hateful motives to the decision. I have no problem in doing that for Justice Thomas in the US SC, for example. I am very far from being a defender of the fox killer but he has a right to express his views, however irrational, hypocritical or febrile.
Those whose duties to uphold the law as it has been established have to be much more measured in their comments and I do agree with the criticism of Maggie Chapman, at least in how she expressed it.
But, much though I admire and generally agree with @Cyclefree , there is an element of triumphalism about this piece that in my opinion goes too far.
Come now, everyone's allowed to cherry pick these days: bad to to criticise the SC intemperately, good to ignore their exhortations to avoid triumphalism.
Yes, as usual my contribution was not particularly original. The judgment itself made the same point.
FWIW I respectfully disagree with them on their construction of the 2004 Act. In my opinion Parliament had, subject to very onerous conditions and third party authentication, stipulated that those with a GRC should be treated as members of the opposite sex.
My real problem with the Scottish GRR was that those safeguards were being removed without any consideration of the consequences for women.
I can’t help but feel that the argument has been distorted here by the sleight of hand by the Scottish government that @cyclefree sets out and by the realisation of the court that if they had decided that the 2004 Act had that effect it would make everything much, much more complicated.
But there are a number of genetically male people who have been taking various hormones, have developed busts and wear feminine clothing who now have to go into male toilets. I don’t think is entirely satisfactory.
Can they not use accessible toilets?
Robin Moira White was arguing on the BBC politics show yesterday that this judgement will lead to the end of men's and women's facilities and if anyone doesn't like it, they can queue up for the accessible toilet.
Organisations failing to provide single sex facilities risk indirect discrimination claims and will also be in breach of their separate legal obligations to provide such facilities as employers to their staff. They may also be in breach of their obligations under the regulations in force since October 2024 to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their staff.
White is not a reliable guide to the law. Dreadful track record in the courts.
Can you expand upon this as I've worked in places with only a single cubicle, shared by everyone, workplaces with separate ones, and workplaces with unisex facilities.
When are single sex facilities required? Is it based on number of employees as presumably places with only one WC aren't expected to have them.
An employer has to provide separate men-only and women-only facilities (toilets and a wash basin) unless it is separate, lockable from the inside.
Right, so a single-WC and basin facility is lawful then since its lockable from the inside.
What about unisex facilities whereby the cubicles with toilets are lockable, but shared wash basins? My last workplace had that, which I never liked, I disliked stepping out of the toilet and seeing a woman at the wash basin, it just feels wrong - and I know my female colleagues objected much more. Primarily on the concept of having to use the toilet after a male, more than the wash basin though.
Is that not legal, because that seems to have become increasingly common. Perhaps unlawfully.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
I didn't mean that to sound like I was having a go at volunteering but rather the saviour complex of thinking that we in this country can solve global problems by setting an example.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
With some notable exceptions.
If Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Xi did nothing the world would be a considerably happier place.
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
Funky design though - do they get buried afterwards? I guess they'll naturally silt up. Wondering how vulnerable they might be to 'accidental' damage from passing ships towing explosives.
Video (AI?) of the tunnel construction. Seems it will be buried. No cycle lane though even though there was an offer to part finance one.
On the risk of damage - these are stupendous pieces of reinforced concrete. Even scratching them would be bloody hard
During the late Cold War, a study was does on what would happen if various North Sea platforms were attacked with torpedoes, by the Russians.
For the Troll B platform (concrete on this scale) a Type 65 torpedo with a half ton warhead would barely scratch one of the legs. The same torpedo with a 10kt nuclear weapon as a warhead *might* destroy the leg it hit (though that was in doubt!) - though it would destroy the topsides.
Roger, this is actual video of Starmer saying the opposite to what he is saying now. Unless manipulated, the opinions of the person posting it are pretty irrelevant.
Starmer is not, it must be said, noted for his consistency. To take one example, apart from that one speech, he's completely stopped calling for the release of the sausages
On topic anyone and everyone is entitled to disagree with a SC decision. That’s called democracy. To give an example the SC made a terrible decision a few years ago now that completely screwed up our law on prescription. An Act of Parliament and several other SC decisions later the law is nowhere near as satisfactory as it had been for decades before that decision. I have no problem saying that as an advocate and officer of the court.
I would even defend the right of people in general to ascribe hateful motives to the decision. I have no problem in doing that for Justice Thomas in the US SC, for example. I am very far from being a defender of the fox killer but he has a right to express his views, however irrational, hypocritical or febrile.
Those whose duties to uphold the law as it has been established have to be much more measured in their comments and I do agree with the criticism of Maggie Chapman, at least in how she expressed it.
But, much though I admire and generally agree with @Cyclefree , there is an element of triumphalism about this piece that in my opinion goes too far.
Come now, everyone's allowed to cherry pick these days: bad to to criticise the SC intemperately, good to ignore their exhortations to avoid triumphalism.
Yes, as usual my contribution was not particularly original. The judgment itself made the same point.
FWIW I respectfully disagree with them on their construction of the 2004 Act. In my opinion Parliament had, subject to very onerous conditions and third party authentication, stipulated that those with a GRC should be treated as members of the opposite sex.
My real problem with the Scottish GRR was that those safeguards were being removed without any consideration of the consequences for women.
I can’t help but feel that the argument has been distorted here by the sleight of hand by the Scottish government that @cyclefree sets out and by the realisation of the court that if they had decided that the 2004 Act had that effect it would make everything much, much more complicated.
But there are a number of genetically male people who have been taking various hormones, have developed busts and wear feminine clothing who now have to go into male toilets. I don’t think is entirely satisfactory.
Can they not use accessible toilets?
Robin Moira White was arguing on the BBC politics show yesterday that this judgement will lead to the end of men's and women's facilities and if anyone doesn't like it, they can queue up for the accessible toilet.
Organisations failing to provide single sex facilities risk indirect discrimination claims and will also be in breach of their separate legal obligations to provide such facilities as employers to their staff. They may also be in breach of their obligations under the regulations in force since October 2024 to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their staff.
White is not a reliable guide to the law. Dreadful track record in the courts.
Can you expand upon this as I've worked in places with only a single cubicle, shared by everyone, workplaces with separate ones, and workplaces with unisex facilities.
When are single sex facilities required? Is it based on number of employees as presumably places with only one WC aren't expected to have them.
An employer has to provide separate men-only and women-only facilities (toilets and a wash basin) unless it is separate, lockable from the inside.
Right, so a single-WC and basin facility is lawful then since its lockable from the inside.
What about unisex facilities whereby the cubicles with toilets are lockable, but shared wash basins? My last workplace had that, which I never liked, I disliked stepping out of the toilet and seeing a woman at the wash basin, it just feels wrong - and I know my female colleagues objected much more. Primarily on the concept of having to use the toilet after a male, more than the wash basin though.
Is that not legal, because that seems to have become increasingly common. Perhaps unlawfully.
My understanding is that you can have mixed use facilities but you still have to have some men-only and women-only provision. in my view the whole toilet provision for employees should be reviewed, it's not changed since the 1970s with the exception of adding disabled provision in the 1990s and doesn't really provide sufficient women-only toilets. I was a union rep in one workplace where a queue for the ladies wasn't uncommon but the employer was providing the bare minimum legal provision.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
That observation accompanies my point quite happily.
On topic anyone and everyone is entitled to disagree with a SC decision. That’s called democracy. To give an example the SC made a terrible decision a few years ago now that completely screwed up our law on prescription. An Act of Parliament and several other SC decisions later the law is nowhere near as satisfactory as it had been for decades before that decision. I have no problem saying that as an advocate and officer of the court.
I would even defend the right of people in general to ascribe hateful motives to the decision. I have no problem in doing that for Justice Thomas in the US SC, for example. I am very far from being a defender of the fox killer but he has a right to express his views, however irrational, hypocritical or febrile.
Those whose duties to uphold the law as it has been established have to be much more measured in their comments and I do agree with the criticism of Maggie Chapman, at least in how she expressed it.
But, much though I admire and generally agree with @Cyclefree , there is an element of triumphalism about this piece that in my opinion goes too far.
Come now, everyone's allowed to cherry pick these days: bad to to criticise the SC intemperately, good to ignore their exhortations to avoid triumphalism.
Yes, as usual my contribution was not particularly original. The judgment itself made the same point.
FWIW I respectfully disagree with them on their construction of the 2004 Act. In my opinion Parliament had, subject to very onerous conditions and third party authentication, stipulated that those with a GRC should be treated as members of the opposite sex.
My real problem with the Scottish GRR was that those safeguards were being removed without any consideration of the consequences for women.
I can’t help but feel that the argument has been distorted here by the sleight of hand by the Scottish government that @cyclefree sets out and by the realisation of the court that if they had decided that the 2004 Act had that effect it would make everything much, much more complicated.
But there are a number of genetically male people who have been taking various hormones, have developed busts and wear feminine clothing who now have to go into male toilets. I don’t think is entirely satisfactory.
Can they not use accessible toilets?
Robin Moira White was arguing on the BBC politics show yesterday that this judgement will lead to the end of men's and women's facilities and if anyone doesn't like it, they can queue up for the accessible toilet.
Organisations failing to provide single sex facilities risk indirect discrimination claims and will also be in breach of their separate legal obligations to provide such facilities as employers to their staff. They may also be in breach of their obligations under the regulations in force since October 2024 to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their staff.
White is not a reliable guide to the law. Dreadful track record in the courts.
Can you expand upon this as I've worked in places with only a single cubicle, shared by everyone, workplaces with separate ones, and workplaces with unisex facilities.
When are single sex facilities required? Is it based on number of employees as presumably places with only one WC aren't expected to have them.
An employer has to provide separate men-only and women-only facilities (toilets and a wash basin) unless it is separate, lockable from the inside.
Right, so a single-WC and basin facility is lawful then since its lockable from the inside.
What about unisex facilities whereby the cubicles with toilets are lockable, but shared wash basins? My last workplace had that, which I never liked, I disliked stepping out of the toilet and seeing a woman at the wash basin, it just feels wrong - and I know my female colleagues objected much more. Primarily on the concept of having to use the toilet after a male, more than the wash basin though.
Is that not legal, because that seems to have become increasingly common. Perhaps unlawfully.
I am sure the loos in m@s Carmarthen are like that.
Amongst the findings of a new Ashcroft poll is that Andy Burnham is the preference of both all voters and Labour voters to succeed Starmer as Labour leader followed by Angela Rayner
Understandable but completely impossible because Andy isn’t an MP
Its entirely possible that the next Labour leader isn't currently an MP.
Its entirely possible that the next Prime Minister isn't currently an MP.
In 2016 the next Tory leader and PM was not an MP.
Err he was.
Oops, you're right! My mistake!
He wasn't in 2014 and he was a potential successor to Cameron in 2016 though, even though he didn't go for it then.
Entirely possible the next Labour leader isn't an MP today. If Burnham were to stand for Parliament at the next election, and Starmer were to stand down after that election, that's a path.
He did go for "it" in 2016. He just got royally shafted by Govey.
He didn't formally go for the MP nominations stage of the Tory process is what I mean but you kind of prove my point.
Had it not been for Gove, then he might have won in 2016, and if he had then those who backed him in 2014 would have won their bets, despite betting on someone who was not [then] an MP.
Burnham could become PM through a similar process, if Starmer is not replaced before the next election. I don't think he will, but it's possible.
Labour are most probably finished forever. Burnham is a blast from the distant and despised past, he isn't going to do any damage to Farage's high flying National Socialists or Jenrick's resurgent populist Tories.
So, if Labour are finished, who do you think the 40+% of the electorate who would never vote for a right-wing party will coalesce around eventually?
I thought Labour were right wing now?
There is a case for arguing that; they are certainly conservative, and I would say they are the closest to a conservative party currently.
But my point still stands if Labour never recover their left-wing credentials; who do the 40+% vote for who will never vote Tory/Reform?
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
"Do-gooders" is a term that often says more about the person using it than those referred to.
A mixed bag of local by-elections tomorrow. There is an Ind defence in Arun, a SNP defence in Fife, a Lab defence in Suffolk, and a LD defence in West Berkshire.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
I didn't mean that to sound like I was having a go at volunteering but rather the saviour complex of thinking that we in this country can solve global problems by setting an example.
We in this country can't solve global problems by 'setting an example'. Cutting off our nose to spite our face does not work.
We in this country can solve global problems by investing in/inventing/facilitating clean technologies.
This country has taken the lead on technological matters for centuries and where we lead others can follow. We should not be trying to cut consumption or restrict people's rights, we should be ambitious to lead on clean consumption and clean technologies that we can export to others.
Through technology we can both help our economy, our exports and the environment.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
What really gets me is that the government seem to have proceeded from the general election with no real planning for being blown off course, when anybody ought to have realised that Trump being re-elected would throw a bloody large spanner in the works. Economic forecasting is hard, and usually pretty useless as we see on a regular basis, but you would have to be as blind as a bat to not see Trump potentially screwing everything up.
On topic anyone and everyone is entitled to disagree with a SC decision. That’s called democracy. To give an example the SC made a terrible decision a few years ago now that completely screwed up our law on prescription. An Act of Parliament and several other SC decisions later the law is nowhere near as satisfactory as it had been for decades before that decision. I have no problem saying that as an advocate and officer of the court.
I would even defend the right of people in general to ascribe hateful motives to the decision. I have no problem in doing that for Justice Thomas in the US SC, for example. I am very far from being a defender of the fox killer but he has a right to express his views, however irrational, hypocritical or febrile.
Those whose duties to uphold the law as it has been established have to be much more measured in their comments and I do agree with the criticism of Maggie Chapman, at least in how she expressed it.
But, much though I admire and generally agree with @Cyclefree , there is an element of triumphalism about this piece that in my opinion goes too far.
Come now, everyone's allowed to cherry pick these days: bad to to criticise the SC intemperately, good to ignore their exhortations to avoid triumphalism.
Yes, as usual my contribution was not particularly original. The judgment itself made the same point.
FWIW I respectfully disagree with them on their construction of the 2004 Act. In my opinion Parliament had, subject to very onerous conditions and third party authentication, stipulated that those with a GRC should be treated as members of the opposite sex.
My real problem with the Scottish GRR was that those safeguards were being removed without any consideration of the consequences for women.
I can’t help but feel that the argument has been distorted here by the sleight of hand by the Scottish government that @cyclefree sets out and by the realisation of the court that if they had decided that the 2004 Act had that effect it would make everything much, much more complicated.
But there are a number of genetically male people who have been taking various hormones, have developed busts and wear feminine clothing who now have to go into male toilets. I don’t think is entirely satisfactory.
Can they not use accessible toilets?
Robin Moira White was arguing on the BBC politics show yesterday that this judgement will lead to the end of men's and women's facilities and if anyone doesn't like it, they can queue up for the accessible toilet.
Organisations failing to provide single sex facilities risk indirect discrimination claims and will also be in breach of their separate legal obligations to provide such facilities as employers to their staff. They may also be in breach of their obligations under the regulations in force since October 2024 to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their staff.
White is not a reliable guide to the law. Dreadful track record in the courts.
Can you expand upon this as I've worked in places with only a single cubicle, shared by everyone, workplaces with separate ones, and workplaces with unisex facilities.
When are single sex facilities required? Is it based on number of employees as presumably places with only one WC aren't expected to have them.
An employer has to provide separate men-only and women-only facilities (toilets and a wash basin) unless it is separate, lockable from the inside.
Right, so a single-WC and basin facility is lawful then since its lockable from the inside.
What about unisex facilities whereby the cubicles with toilets are lockable, but shared wash basins? My last workplace had that, which I never liked, I disliked stepping out of the toilet and seeing a woman at the wash basin, it just feels wrong - and I know my female colleagues objected much more. Primarily on the concept of having to use the toilet after a male, more than the wash basin though.
Is that not legal, because that seems to have become increasingly common. Perhaps unlawfully.
My understanding is that you can have mixed use facilities but you still have to have some men-only and women-only provision. in my view the whole toilet provision for employees should be reviewed, it's not changed since the 1970s with the exception of adding disabled provision in the 1990s and doesn't really provide sufficient women-only toilets. I was a union rep in one workplace where a queue for the ladies wasn't uncommon but the employer was providing the bare minimum legal provision.
I remember pointing out that exact issue in 1990 at Newcastle University which did result in the refurbished loos in the student union being changed to create 2 new ladies loos.
Amongst the findings of a new Ashcroft poll is that Andy Burnham is the preference of both all voters and Labour voters to succeed Starmer as Labour leader followed by Angela Rayner
Understandable but completely impossible because Andy isn’t an MP
Its entirely possible that the next Labour leader isn't currently an MP.
Its entirely possible that the next Prime Minister isn't currently an MP.
In 2016 the next Tory leader and PM was not an MP.
Err he was.
Oops, you're right! My mistake!
He wasn't in 2014 and he was a potential successor to Cameron in 2016 though, even though he didn't go for it then.
Entirely possible the next Labour leader isn't an MP today. If Burnham were to stand for Parliament at the next election, and Starmer were to stand down after that election, that's a path.
He did go for "it" in 2016. He just got royally shafted by Govey.
The best speech Boris Johnson ever made was the one then explaining why he was not suitable to be PM.
I'm sure what he was really saying was he was the worst candidate to be PM...apart from all the others.
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
Bye! Sent from my iPad
Good luck & hope all goes well. Never forget we've always had the Daughter of Time on our side.
Comment: I didn't report this to the LancashireConstabulary- they ignore vehicles charging through red lights at speed, so there's no hope of action over ignoring 2 mini-roundabouts. I'm putting it on here to illustrate posts about mini-roundabouts, including an incident where I was already on this roundabout coming towards the camera and a car took the same course as the blue Transit Connect and almost slammed straight into me.
Farage seems to think we should have no climate change targets at all. I don’t think he’s changed his mind at all, he’s just dishonestly pretending he’s not still a climate change denier.
It’s a form of denial to think that anything we do to reduce emissions within the UK will make a difference to the trajectory of global climate change.
For the vast majority of people the good they do in the world matters little in the grand scheme of things. However most of them do not use this fact to justify not bothering. If they did everything would go to shit in very short order.
Doing good on a small scale is fine, but all too often do gooders do harm.
So we all do f*** all do we? Most people here do stuff. Lots stand for council, support charities or their church or their school. I'm an atheist, but admire people who work for their church rather than do f*** all for their community and just moan.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
I didn't mean that to sound like I was having a go at volunteering but rather the saviour complex of thinking that we in this country can solve global problems by setting an example.
Ah that cute trick of yours - taking lefty wokey terms and seeking to repurpose on behalf of the nihilistic right.
"Saviour complex" means driven by a patronising sense of superiority. This isn't the case with the transition to green energy. It's a genuine imperative being pursued for the right reasons - to mitigate the damage from manmade climate change.
Roger, this is actual video of Starmer saying the opposite to what he is saying now. Unless manipulated, the opinions of the person posting it are pretty irrelevant.
Starmer is not, it must be said, noted for his consistency. To take one example, apart from that one speech, he's completely stopped calling for the release of the sausages
I have no opinion on the material posted other than the weirdness of where Isam finds his material. How deep would you have to dig to find a site posted by a Mancunion under an Israeli flag when looking at questions of truth and morality?
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
Because you are trolling for a response and seem to have a desire to chase @cyclefree away from this site
Roger, this is actual video of Starmer saying the opposite to what he is saying now. Unless manipulated, the opinions of the person posting it are pretty irrelevant.
Starmer is not, it must be said, noted for his consistency. To take one example, apart from that one speech, he's completely stopped calling for the release of the sausages
I have no opinion on the material posted other than the weirdness of where Isam finds his material. How deep would you have to dig to find a site posted by a Mancunion under an Israeli flag when looking at questions of truth and morality?
There’s this little place that used to be called twitter… bit niche, but you can find some interesting stuff
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
What really gets me is that the government seem to have proceeded from the general election with no real planning for being blown off course, when anybody ought to have realised that Trump being re-elected would throw a bloody large spanner in the works. Economic forecasting is hard, and usually pretty useless as we see on a regular basis, but you would have to be as blind as a bat to not see Trump potentially screwing everything up.
It seems to me that priority number one for Labour from July 2024 was to deal with debt, deficit, tax and spend and place it on a sustainable footing which could be explained to the public without smoke and mirrors.
It still looks as if they are borrowing vast sums in addition to the vast borrowing of the last 20 years, without real visible means of support, and that they are doing to to fund current account expenditure - which is absolutely the stuff which taxes are for. This does not look as if it gets easier to achieve by waiting. You just get nearer to the next election.
And we have the fiscal/financial effects of Trump's war on global trade, and his war on NATO coming up fast. I think this might be the greatest fail of this administration.
I would be more than pleased to be put right by the people who understand this stuff better.
The former Fox News host wrote in a recent book that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men” and that mothers were needed “but not in the military, especially in combat units”.
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
What really gets me is that the government seem to have proceeded from the general election with no real planning for being blown off course, when anybody ought to have realised that Trump being re-elected would throw a bloody large spanner in the works. Economic forecasting is hard, and usually pretty useless as we see on a regular basis, but you would have to be as blind as a bat to not see Trump potentially screwing everything up.
It seems to me that priority number one for Labour from July 2024 was to deal with debt, deficit, tax and spend and place it on a sustainable footing which could be explained to the public without smoke and mirrors.
It still looks as if they are borrowing vast sums in addition to the vast borrowing of the last 20 years, without real visible means of support, and that they are doing to to fund current account expenditure - which is absolutely the stuff which taxes are for. This does not look as if it gets easier to achieve by waiting. You just get nearer to the next election.
And we have the fiscal/financial effects of Trump's war on global trade, and his war on NATO coming up fast. I think this might be the greatest fail of this administration.
I would be more than pleased to be put right by the people who understand this stuff better.
Sorry, how do you mean? In what way can the catastrophe of Trump2 be regarded as a fail of this UK administration?
So assuming that this Parliament will do nothing to change the GRA or EA to change the law we'll now have at least 3-4 years to live under the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law.
The Cyclefree position is that this will make women safer. I think it will make women less safe with the added disadvantage of making trans people less safe as well. Are there any datasets we can look at over the next few years to determine which one of us is right?
You’ll probably both find statistics to support your position. It will probably be impossible to distinguish from other effects.
Probably right. That's the case with many things.
Something I'd like to see covered (and it never seems to be) is how other countries handle this issue of the legal sex of transgender people and their inclusion (or not) in women's spaces.
I could be wrong but my impression is we are making a particular meal of it. If so, why is that?
One reason is that people in this country with no strong ideological view get dragged to and fro by the ultras. I think Starmer is possibly a prime example. It seems a particularly Anglo Saxon obsession and perforce one that everyone on this island gets splattered with. It appears to have had electoral effects in the US and UK, while in Australia the GCs got carried away and off-puttingly ended up with Neo Nazis as fellow travellers. Canada seems more variegated due to its federal system. Heaven forfend that the UK had a system that stopped central government overruling the provinces.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
(Proposal: US recognition of 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukraine banned from NATO.)
He also implied that the Elysee Palace is Europe's answer to Mar a Lago.
That's nowhere near enough for VVP I would have thought. Maybe he can take the deal and hang it around Lavrov's neck. The sneaky old fuck is rumoured, in the always fidelitous Russian media, to want to retire to Italy so perhaps he takes the blame for this sparse settlement, says ciao and doesn't get locked up/shot for tax evasion.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
What really gets me is that the government seem to have proceeded from the general election with no real planning for being blown off course, when anybody ought to have realised that Trump being re-elected would throw a bloody large spanner in the works. Economic forecasting is hard, and usually pretty useless as we see on a regular basis, but you would have to be as blind as a bat to not see Trump potentially screwing everything up.
It seems to me that priority number one for Labour from July 2024 was to deal with debt, deficit, tax and spend and place it on a sustainable footing which could be explained to the public without smoke and mirrors.
It still looks as if they are borrowing vast sums in addition to the vast borrowing of the last 20 years, without real visible means of support, and that they are doing to to fund current account expenditure - which is absolutely the stuff which taxes are for. This does not look as if it gets easier to achieve by waiting. You just get nearer to the next election.
And we have the fiscal/financial effects of Trump's war on global trade, and his war on NATO coming up fast. I think this might be the greatest fail of this administration.
I would be more than pleased to be put right by the people who understand this stuff better.
Sorry, how do you mean? In what way can the catastrophe of Trump2 be regarded as a fail of this UK administration?
Sorry, badly expressed. The big fail of the UK government would be to fail to put debt, deficit, tax and spend in a sustainable position which is comprehensible to the public, starting in July 2024, and be fiscally prepared for the various Trumpian onslaughts.
Instead, SFAICS we are still borrowing at eye watering levels to meet current account expenditure with no plan to pay it back and a fanciful plan to keep it under control in the future but not now. This is the place we have been growing into since 2008. I don't think anything has changed under the new administration.
Comment: I didn't report this to the LancashireConstabulary- they ignore vehicles charging through red lights at speed, so there's no hope of action over ignoring 2 mini-roundabouts. I'm putting it on here to illustrate posts about mini-roundabouts, including an incident where I was already on this roundabout coming towards the camera and a car took the same course as the blue Transit Connect and almost slammed straight into me.
The right turn into the road for my youngest's school is a mini-roundabout, hence a reluctance for them to cycle there on their own, despite being entirely competent on a bike they're still not 100% at judging whether the incompetent driver approaching from the other direction is going to obey the give way or plough straight through, and if the latter when to swerve left and scrape along the offside of the offending vehicle rather than go under the front. It's far too easy to obtain and keep a driving license.
The emergence of Jenrick’s Electoral Pact policy simply means even more votes and wins for Libdems, even less votes and more defeats for the Conservatives. Simples.
My reasoning is, what motivates a lot of votes is not a vote for, but a blocking vote against. As example, there clearly is little love or belief for Starmer and his Labour Party, either before the last general election or after it, so what created the size of majority is hate not love.
So what actually happens in Jenrick’s “pact”? Every Trump thing Farage comes out with “No Working from Home - if you don’t turn up for work you won’t have a job, simples” is owned by the Conservative Party. Vote Tory - get end of all working from home.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
But the British minister has been embarrassed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s sudden decision late on Tuesday not to turn up and a rising chorus of leaks apparently from the US and Russia designed to derail the discussions and to promote the idea that the most significant discussions are those taking place directly between Washington and Moscow...
The US is effectively trying to surrender Ukraine's sovereignty. I note Dura is spinning that as "nowhere near enough for VVP". If that is truly the case, then there's little to talk about.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
Sorry, badly expressed. The big fail of the UK government would be to fail to put debt, deficit, tax and spend in a sustainable position which is comprehensible to the public, starting in July 2024, and be fiscally prepared for the various Trumpian onslaughts.
Instead, SFAICS we are still borrowing at eye watering levels to meet current account expenditure with no plan to pay it back and a fanciful plan to keep it under control in the future but not now. This is the place we have been growing into since 2008. I don't think anything has changed under the new administration.
Exactly. Labour's entire "plan" is predicated on achieving above trend growth, and as each day passes I keep wondering "when are they going to explain how they get above trend growth?"
I am quite sympathetic towards the government, but I'm also increasingly concerned that they really aren't up to the job.
JD Vance-If we don’t receive a positive response, we will step back from mediating between Russia and Ukraine. We’ve put forward a clear and fair proposal to both sides.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
Yes, a quick Google search finds many such articles from people complaining about seeing the individuals penis.
Do you think its acceptable to be showing a penis in a woman's changing room?
Why is Cyclefree in the wrong? Check your privilege.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
I think in practice that Trans men will continue to use male facilities, in breach of the law but no one is bothered. That is one of many ways that the law is difficult to enforce. By the nature of single sex facilities they are private, so not subject to the social policing of things like smoking bans.
In an office or hospital environment where the same people work together there is more potential for social policing. In more open places I would expect a shift to unisex facilities. In practice many people don't like to change in front of other people even of the same sex.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
Yes, a quick Google search finds many such articles from people complaining about seeing the individuals penis.
Do you think its acceptable to be showing a penis in a woman's changing room?
Why is Cyclefree in the wrong? Check your privilege.
Oh come on.
The word “erect” sexualises this act in a fundamental way. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what else to say.
I have enjoyed the people who so attacked the Supreme Court (“enemies of the people”) now saying how brilliant the Supreme Court are.
I haven't. They still need to be abolished. I do think they are doing it with an eye to the future though. It's not the behaviour of an organisation that is confident that we are at the start of a thousand year Starmer reich.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
There are plenty of reports of Thomas taking out his/her penis in women's changing rooms. That is, indeed, a gross indecency offence regardless of whether it was erect. Many think that team mates commenting that Lia still has a penis and is still attracted to women implies that the girls do indeed have to put up with his/her erections. So I'm not sure what it is you think Cyclefree should walk back.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
Yes, a quick Google search finds many such articles from people complaining about seeing the individuals penis.
Do you think its acceptable to be showing a penis in a woman's changing room?
Why is Cyclefree in the wrong? Check your privilege.
Oh come on.
The word “erect” sexualises this act in a fundamental way. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what else to say.
No, you come on. When it comes not not seeing that, then not seeing a penis in a female changing room is what I'd rather not see, than posts from Cyclefree.
And I have no desire to spend any more time browsing websites on this subject matter to discern whether there are reports of an erect penis or not. The report I read was that an athlete complained about seeing the penis and didn't want to discuss it any further, which is quite frankly enough for me and shame on you if its not enough for you.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
Ok but the constant chuntering of the "are they women?" question is reductive and unenlightening. I guess it's to some extent a blowback from the strident "TWAW" sloganeering of the TRAs.
The fact is it's not a yes/no unless you're on the extremes of the debate. The SC ruling means it's a no ... for the purposes of the EA 2010. But the GRR 2004 is still on the statute book and s9 of that says the following:
Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).
That's more like a yes.
So it's a yes and a no, and also a mostly and a sometimes and a both and a neither. Rejecting the simple yes/no answer isn't a sign of confusion or slipperiness. It's a perfectly valid thing to do.
As for triumphalism, women won an important victory. They changed the political weather. I was told on here repeatedly that this was an unimportant issue - often in a patronising and dismissive way.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:- - convulsed Scottish politics - changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour - shown up a lot of politicians as cowards - led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come - led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children - has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children - has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government - raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about - and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
Ok but the constant chuntering of the "are they women?" question is reductive and unenlightening. I guess it's to some extent a blowback from the strident "TWAW" sloganeering of the TRAs.
The fact is it's not a yes/no unless you're on the extremes of the debate. The SC ruling means it's a no ... for the purposes of the EA 2010. But the GRR 2004 is still on the statute book and s9 of that says the following:
Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).
That's more like a yes.
So it's a yes and a no, and also a mostly and a sometimes and a both and a neither. Rejecting the simple yes/no answer isn't a sign of confusion or slipperiness. It's a perfectly valid thing to do.
Starmer could amend or repeal either bit of legislation to clarify things if he wanted to.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
He was awful on R4 Today this morning and didn't really try to disguise how terrible he was being.
The Greens haven't read Starmer's guidebook, let alone Machiavelli's.
Otoh Robinson needed a swift kick in the baws after endlessly repeating his ‘is a trans woman a woman’ mantra. Difficult to do it over the phone so Ramsay gets a pass.
This is a very useful reform, if it's as described. It might have seen HS2 completed, had it been in place a decade or so back.
NEW: The Planning and Infrastructure bill will abolish the legal requirement to consult before submitting a planning application for major infrastructure projects.
My take: This is a big shift. Consultation is good in theory, but it has become a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise.
Developers are over-consulting in response to frequent (and in my view, disingenous) complaints from councils that they haven't been 'adequately consulted'.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
I didn't flag it, but I think you're being rude to Cyclefree who hasn't engaged in any back-and-forth discussion so you can't pretend the lack of response to you "speaks for itself" when she hasn't responded to anyone and has simply shared her thoughts, which is eminently reasonable.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
Yes, a quick Google search finds many such articles from people complaining about seeing the individuals penis.
Do you think its acceptable to be showing a penis in a woman's changing room?
Why is Cyclefree in the wrong? Check your privilege.
Oh come on.
The word “erect” sexualises this act in a fundamental way. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what else to say.
I think your obsession about this says an awful lot (and nothing good) about you and nothing about anyone else
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
How on earth do you get a forecast for the year out by 9.6% when you're producing a report with about 85% of the data already known ?!
It indicates the error on the unknown portion was ~ 70ish %.
...or that the remaining 15% was grossly skewed. See, for example, the results from the 2024 Arizona Senate election, which had Kari Lake catching up but not fast enough as later results came in.
I have enjoyed the people who so attacked the Supreme Court (“enemies of the people”) now saying how brilliant the Supreme Court are.
I haven't. They still need to be abolished. I do think they are doing it with an eye to the future though. It's not the behaviour of an organisation that is confident that we are at the start of a thousand year Starmer reich.
We need a final level appeal court - it was the House of Lords but that was replaced for sensible reasons. So what are you proposing we replace the Supreme Court with and how would it be different to the Supreme Court as it currently is given its main purpose
However I would challenge one assumption that Cyclefree has made - a group who are entirely within their rights to question whether the Supreme Court's ruling is the right one that should be the law is politicians - and anyone else who engages in political debate under our right to free speech.
The Supreme Court ruling on any matter is not the end of the debate, it is the end of the debate as to what the law is today.
If the politicians, or any campaigners, or anyone else interested in politics, or any citizens at all, wish the law were different then they are entirely within their rights to say that the law is an ass, and the law should be changed, in Parliament. That is what Parliament is for.
They just can't pretend the law is anything other than what the Court says it is anymore.
Advocating a change to the law is a very different thing to declaring that the law has been misinterpreted by bigoted supreme court judges.
JD Vance-If we don’t receive a positive response, we will step back from mediating between Russia and Ukraine. We’ve put forward a clear and fair proposal to both sides.
I'm not sure "giving Russia most of what it wants (for the moment) counts as either clear or fair.
We're left hoping that Putin is so insane and greedy that he thinks he can get more so he rejects the offer. This is suboptimal. Ideally, the European powers, including us, would make it clear that the deal proposed is not acceptable.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
How about the line is drawn with sex?
If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space.
Clean and simple.
There is a perfectly reasonable alternative for trans people of change somewhere else, eg gender-neutral facilities and stay out of single-sex facilities.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
I think in practice that Trans men will continue to use male facilities, in breach of the law but no one is bothered. That is one of many ways that the law is difficult to enforce. By the nature of single sex facilities they are private, so not subject to the social policing of things like smoking bans.
In an office or hospital environment where the same people work together there is more potential for social policing. In more open places I would expect a shift to unisex facilities. In practice many people don't like to change in front of other people even of the same sex.
I'm not bothered when trans men use the gents, but I'm used to being in a minority and it seems in this case I am. According to the YouGov poll from December, 53% of men thought that trans men should not be allowed in male toilets, 53% of women thought that trans women shouldn't be allowed in female toilets.
So assuming that this Parliament will do nothing to change the GRA or EA to change the law we'll now have at least 3-4 years to live under the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law.
The Cyclefree position is that this will make women safer. I think it will make women less safe with the added disadvantage of making trans people less safe as well. Are there any datasets we can look at over the next few years to determine which one of us is right?
You’ll probably both find statistics to support your position. It will probably be impossible to distinguish from other effects.
Probably right. That's the case with many things.
Something I'd like to see covered (and it never seems to be) is how other countries handle this issue of the legal sex of transgender people and their inclusion (or not) in women's spaces.
I could be wrong but my impression is we are making a particular meal of it. If so, why is that?
One reason is that people in this country with no strong ideological view get dragged to and fro by the ultras. I think Starmer is possibly a prime example. It seems a particularly Anglo Saxon obsession and perforce one that everyone on this island gets splattered with. It appears to have had electoral effects in the US and UK, while in Australia the GCs got carried away and off-puttingly ended up with Neo Nazis as fellow travellers. Canada seems more variegated due to its federal system. Heaven forfend that the UK had a system that stopped central government overruling the provinces.
That's right, when I've seen it referenced about other countries it's been "anglo" ones. I'm curious as to how it's handled in our continent, Europe. How (if they have) have the likes of Germany, France, Spain etc managed to create a system that allows a legal change of gender without causing the rumpus we've seen over here?
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
How about the line is drawn with sex?
If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space.
Clean and simple.
There is a perfectly reasonable alternative for trans people of change somewhere else, eg gender-neutral facilities and stay out of single-sex facilities.
I'm in favour of the court's ruling but IIUC people should now use the changing room of their (biological) sex.
Which isn't quite the same as "If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space."
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
How on earth do you get a forecast for the year out by 9.6% when you're producing a report with about 85% of the data already known ?!
It indicates the error on the unknown portion was ~ 70ish %.
...or that the remaining 15% was grossly skewed. See, for example, the results from the 2024 Arizona Senate election, which had Kari Lake catching up but not fast enough as later results came in.
I had money on that: I may have mentioned it...
Or, more likely in my opinion, that there have been significant revisals to some of the "known" data.
But the point made by Freedman remains valid. The OBR's estimates continuously prove to be seriously unreliable. Restricting what we can spend now on the basis of where they think we will be in 5 years time is frankly laughable. In fairness to them it was Hunt that came up with this nonsense of debt falling in 5 years time and Reeves who kept it for her own purposes.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
How about the line is drawn with sex?
If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space.
Clean and simple.
There is a perfectly reasonable alternative for trans people of change somewhere else, eg gender-neutral facilities and stay out of single-sex facilities.
I'm in favour of the court's ruling but IIUC people should now use the changing room of their (biological) sex.
Which isn't quite the same as "If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space."
No, trans people might be excluded from both spaces was the ruling according to the EHRC.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/f89ecc90-d81e-4f92-967b-8b6309cbb65f?shareToken=89a05676716e9d9c97242f0bbde7bbd2 In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Undoubtedly this creates a double bind for trans people, and lawful solutions that preserve dignity and enable the full participation of trans people in public life must be found. An obvious one is to provide additional mixed-sex spaces alongside single-sex ones.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
How on earth do you get a forecast for the year out by 9.6% when you're producing a report with about 85% of the data already known ?!
It indicates the error on the unknown portion was ~ 70ish %.
...or that the remaining 15% was grossly skewed. See, for example, the results from the 2024 Arizona Senate election, which had Kari Lake catching up but not fast enough as later results came in.
I had money on that: I may have mentioned it...
Or, more likely in my opinion, that there have been significant revisals to some of the "known" data.
But the point made by Freedman remains valid. The OBR's estimates continuously prove to be seriously unreliable. Restricting what we can spend now on the basis of where they think we will be in 5 years time is frankly laughable. In fairness to them it was Hunt that came up with this nonsense of debt falling in 5 years time and Reeves who kept it for her own purposes.
No, it was Hunt adopting the cold fusion strategy for debt.
Debt falling is five years away, and it always will be.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
How about the line is drawn with sex?
If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space.
Clean and simple.
There is a perfectly reasonable alternative for trans people of change somewhere else, eg gender-neutral facilities and stay out of single-sex facilities.
I'm in favour of the court's ruling but IIUC people should now use the changing room of their (biological) sex.
Which isn't quite the same as "If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space."
No, trans people might be excluded from both spaces was the ruling according to the EHRC.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/f89ecc90-d81e-4f92-967b-8b6309cbb65f?shareToken=89a05676716e9d9c97242f0bbde7bbd2 In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Undoubtedly this creates a double bind for trans people, and lawful solutions that preserve dignity and enable the full participation of trans people in public life must be found. An obvious one is to provide additional mixed-sex spaces alongside single-sex ones.
OK - the way round that, since building third toilets/changing rooms or whatever is going to be cost prohibitive for a lot of places is to keep the female facilities and relabel the mens to include everyone. We (Men) don't need sex protections from women in public tbh.
The leaders of the Green Party are split over its response to the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
Ok but the constant chuntering of the "are they women?" question is reductive and unenlightening. I guess it's to some extent a blowback from the strident "TWAW" sloganeering of the TRAs.
The fact is it's not a yes/no unless you're on the extremes of the debate. The SC ruling means it's a no ... for the purposes of the EA 2010. But the GRR 2004 is still on the statute book and s9 of that says the following:
Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).
That's more like a yes.
So it's a yes and a no, and also a mostly and a sometimes and a both and a neither. Rejecting the simple yes/no answer isn't a sign of confusion or slipperiness. It's a perfectly valid thing to do.
Starmer could amend or repeal either bit of legislation to clarify things if he wanted to.
That doesn't mean people have to answer "yes" or "no" to a bad faith question.
JD Vance-If we don’t receive a positive response, we will step back from mediating between Russia and Ukraine. We’ve put forward a clear and fair proposal to both sides.
I'm not sure "giving Russia most of what it wants (for the moment) counts as either clear or fair.
We're left hoping that Putin is so insane and greedy that he thinks he can get more so he rejects the offer. This is suboptimal. Ideally, the European powers, including us, would make it clear that the deal proposed is not acceptable.
Putin has gone from evil, but clever and competent, to evil and delusional, at some point.
In the past four months, Russia has taken vast casualties, in return for going nowhere. The Europeans are ramping up military production, and the oil price has plunged. Yet, for some reason, he thinks he can be awarded political and territorial gains that he has been unable to win on the battlefield.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 1h The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
How on earth do you get a forecast for the year out by 9.6% when you're producing a report with about 85% of the data already known ?!
It indicates the error on the unknown portion was ~ 70ish %.
...or that the remaining 15% was grossly skewed. See, for example, the results from the 2024 Arizona Senate election, which had Kari Lake catching up but not fast enough as later results came in.
I had money on that: I may have mentioned it...
Or, more likely in my opinion, that there have been significant revisals to some of the "known" data.
But the point made by Freedman remains valid. The OBR's estimates continuously prove to be seriously unreliable. Restricting what we can spend now on the basis of where they think we will be in 5 years time is frankly laughable. In fairness to them it was Hunt that came up with this nonsense of debt falling in 5 years time and Reeves who kept it for her own purposes.
No, it was Hunt adopting the cold fusion strategy for debt.
Debt falling is five years away, and it always will be.
Err...that is what I said. But Reeves didn't change this as a target when introducing her new, improved, financial framework, hence the OBR's frankly meaningless guess is restricting our room for manoeuvre now.
Because @Cyclefree’s profile is private, it appears to be impossible to discover whether she has retracted her apparently false & deeply unpleasant remarks about Lia Thomas.
Have you retracted them Cyclefree? I have searched all the news articles I could find, as did several others here & can find no mention anywhere of the behaviour you describe. Since it would have been so explosive, I have little doubt that right wing outlets would have made a huge deal of it (and rightly so in that case, frankly) but there appears to be nothing.
I seems to me that you have accused her of a crime. I don’t think an honest person would let that statement stand, if they knew it to be false. Obviously I apologise in advance if you have retracted them already, or if you can substantiate your remarks.
Since @Cyclefree has turned up, I would like to know her answer to this.
Her lack of response speaks for itself I guess.
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
But that is what the Supreme Court has just decided, trans men who have had a phalloplasty are women. The perceived threat was always that men could just put on a dress and claim to be a trans woman, now a man could just lie and say they are a trans man. I think that will make women less safe than the previous position.
Interesting that you seem to be impugning that "trans men" who have had surgery are a major threat to women, while "trans women" who are still biologically male, and are numerically a much-greater number of people (since most trans people don't get surgery changing their genitals) are not. How do you square that circle?
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
My position is that neither trans men or trans women are a threat. They are just people trying to live their lives. But I do recognise that most women don't want men in female-only spaces. So the line between men and women has to be drawn somewhere. For me the ideal would be for that to be on legal gender, it's easy to prove. But the EA doesn't allow for that option (I don't like it but reading the EA it's not a wrong decision). So we have a line where it's impossible to prove that you are entitled to be in a female-only space. Birth Certificate or Passport? no good because some men have F and some women have M. Appearance? That's really tricky, as I've mentioned I've got a butch lesbian aunt and I had a female friend at college who grew a better moustache than I could. Any line will have cis women on the wrong side of it.
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
We know that trans women generally have similar offending patterns to men, not women, even if the individual has undergone hormonal and surgical treatment to transition. So you are 18 times more likely to be physically assaulted by a trans woman than by a man. There is evidence that suggests trans women are more likely to be violent sex offenders than men - hardly surprising since the mantra that TWAW allows sexual predators to access women in vulnerable situations simply by saying they are women.
Of course, most trans women are not a threat, just as most men are not a threat. But we cannot ignore the fact that allowing biological males into women-only spaces compromises women's safety.
A line that simply says if you have, or have ever had, a penis you are not allowed in women's spaces would not put any cis women on the wrong side and would be a lot safer for women than allowing trans women in.
Comments
Something I'd like to see covered (and it never seems to be) is how other countries handle this issue of the legal sex of transgender people and their inclusion (or not) in women's spaces.
I could be wrong but my impression is we are making a particular meal of it. If so, why is that?
What about unisex facilities whereby the cubicles with toilets are lockable, but shared wash basins? My last workplace had that, which I never liked, I disliked stepping out of the toilet and seeing a woman at the wash basin, it just feels wrong - and I know my female colleagues objected much more. Primarily on the concept of having to use the toilet after a male, more than the wash basin though.
Is that not legal, because that seems to have become increasingly common. Perhaps unlawfully.
Society bonds by mutual support. If we all did nothing it would be a miserable place to live. Volunteers are the life blood of community.
Sam Freedman
@samfr.bsky.social
· 1h
The government borrowed £151 billion last financial year. Which was £14.6 billion more than the OBR estimate *last month*.
And yet their forecasts for five years time are being used as the entire basis for public policy decision making.
https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3lnhtgyzhyo2c
Not that UAE has a spotless record either, of course.
If Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Xi did nothing the world would be a considerably happier place.
Such an unimportant issue that it has:-
- convulsed Scottish politics
- changed the views of Scottish and U.K. Labour
- shown up a lot of politicians as cowards
- led to significant judgments on devolution, the major statutes on equality law and charity law, well as many other judgments in lesser courts with more to come
- led to significant changes to GIDS, the Cass Report and the provision of puberty blockers to children
- has raised issues about on medical malpractice, free speech, the clash of rights, how women are treated in our society, how to deal properly with minority rights, how to deal with gender questioning children
- has shown up the incestuous relationship between charities, lobby groups and politicians & government
- raises issues - still being avoided - about the ubiquity of violent and degrading pornography, some of it aimed at transwomen and in a way which puts them at risk from other men but which men are unwilling to do anything about
- and so on.
Yeah - an unimportant issue. Especially for a politics forum.
I really don't care what people think of my tone. I have not - frankly - much enjoyed the tone of some of the comments aimed at me. And have largely bitten my tongue or taken a break.
But over 40 years of dealing with scandals has given me a good nose for spotting scandals in the making and one of those clues is when people are dishonest about what they are trying to do, when they try to shut you up & when they have scant or no regard for those who will endure the consequences. This had all these elements and I make absolutely no apology for raising this issue.
It is not just important in its own right but because the lessons to be learned from it are highly relevant to another change going through Parliament right now: the Assisted Dying Bill.
One of the placards at London's demo on Saturday said that "All Boundaries are Conventions Waiting to be Transcended."
Really? All of them? Think about that for a moment and ask yourselves if that is really wise?
This is my 280th header since March 2016. I am back in hospital later this week. I will not be around for a while. And if you don't like what I have to say, remember that I long ago reached the stage where IDGAF, after a career, a life of hearing endless bullshit from men.
Bye!
Sent from my iPad
During the late Cold War, a study was does on what would happen if various North Sea platforms were attacked with torpedoes, by the Russians.
For the Troll B platform (concrete on this scale) a Type 65 torpedo with a half ton warhead would barely scratch one of the legs. The same torpedo with a 10kt nuclear weapon as a warhead *might* destroy the leg it hit (though that was in doubt!) - though it would destroy the topsides.
Roger, this is actual video of Starmer saying the opposite to what he is saying now. Unless manipulated, the opinions of the person posting it are pretty irrelevant.
Starmer is not, it must be said, noted for his consistency. To take one example, apart from that one speech, he's completely stopped calling for the release of the sausages
(I've raised a Liverpool fan; Lord have mercy on my soul)
ETA: There's that old rhyme, of course: first the worst, second the best, third... well at this point we can only guess
But my point still stands if Labour never recover their left-wing credentials; who do the 40+% vote for who will never vote Tory/Reform?
Lest we forget Arsenal were only promoted to the top flight due to corruption.
We in this country can solve global problems by investing in/inventing/facilitating clean technologies.
This country has taken the lead on technological matters for centuries and where we lead others can follow. We should not be trying to cut consumption or restrict people's rights, we should be ambitious to lead on clean consumption and clean technologies that we can export to others.
Through technology we can both help our economy, our exports and the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_British_football_match-fixing_scandal
Fwiw, when people talk about bigotry, this is one of the behaviours they’re referring to - the sexualisation of everything that trans people do, no matter how innocuous.
What Lia did was permissible at the time under the rules of their sport. Testimony from the time shows that there was no where else for them to get changed . You can (rightly) argue about whether or not she should have been allowed to compete, or to be in that changing room at all.
Cyclefree went far beyond that mark - contemporaneous accounts simply don’t match her description of events & her depiction of a transwoman in these gross sexualised terms which appear to be completely untrue is not OK.
(edit: re:flags, please do explain why you think my comments are unacceptable.)
https://upride.cc/incident/pn65hxf_transitconnect_roundaboutignore/
Comment:
I didn't report this to the LancashireConstabulary- they ignore vehicles charging through red lights at speed, so there's no hope of action over ignoring 2 mini-roundabouts. I'm putting it on here to illustrate posts about mini-roundabouts, including an incident where I was already on this roundabout coming towards the camera and a car took the same course as the blue Transit Connect and almost slammed straight into me.
"Saviour complex" means driven by a patronising sense of superiority. This isn't the case with the transition to green energy. It's a genuine imperative being pursued for the right reasons - to mitigate the damage from manmade climate change.
Don’t tell everyone though
https://youtu.be/XAWp8BksCxg?t=1018
(Proposal: US recognition of 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukraine banned from NATO.)
He also implied that the Elysee Palace is Europe's answer to Mar a Lago.
It still looks as if they are borrowing vast sums in addition to the vast borrowing of the last 20 years, without real visible means of support, and that they are doing to to fund current account expenditure - which is absolutely the stuff which taxes are for. This does not look as if it gets easier to achieve by waiting. You just get nearer to the next election.
And we have the fiscal/financial effects of Trump's war on global trade, and his war on NATO coming up fast. I think this might be the greatest fail of this administration.
I would be more than pleased to be put right by the people who understand this stuff better.
It seems a particularly Anglo Saxon obsession and perforce one that everyone on this island gets splattered with. It appears to have had electoral effects in the US and UK, while in Australia the GCs got carried away and off-puttingly ended up with Neo Nazis as fellow travellers. Canada seems more variegated due to its federal system. Heaven forfend that the UK had a system that stopped central government overruling the provinces.
It indicates the error on the unknown portion was ~ 70ish %.
As for Lia, I have no idea what you're talking about, but from a quick Google search all I can see is articles from fellow-athletes complaining about seeing his/her/their penis in a female-only changing room.
That is disgusting. Nobody with a penis should be going into a female-only changing room and even if you did there are ways to get changed without showing your penis to others, such as getting changed in a cubicle or underneath a towel.
It is not "innocuous" to be displaying a penis in a woman's changing room and that you think it is shows how far gone you are and speaks volumes about you, not Cyclefree.
Adrian Ramsay repeatedly refused to answer on Wednesday morning if he believed that trans women are women.
https://archive.ph/2025.04.23-084911/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/04/23/green-party-leaders-split-over-trans-policy/
Instead, SFAICS we are still borrowing at eye watering levels to meet current account expenditure with no plan to pay it back and a fanciful plan to keep it under control in the future but not now. This is the place we have been growing into since 2008. I don't think anything has changed under the new administration.
It's far too easy to obtain and keep a driving license.
My reasoning is, what motivates a lot of votes is not a vote for, but a blocking vote against. As example, there clearly is little love or belief for Starmer and his Labour Party, either before the last general election or after it, so what created the size of majority is hate not love.
So what actually happens in Jenrick’s “pact”? Every Trump thing Farage comes out with “No Working from Home - if you don’t turn up for work you won’t have a job, simples” is owned by the Conservative Party. Vote Tory - get end of all working from home.
“Let's see: Lia Thomas, swimmer. As a man, got nowhere in competitions. As a woman won loads, upset female competitors by wandering round the changing rooms naked with an erect penis (according to reports)...”
Cyclefree escalated from actions that were permissible, even if you disagree with them, to apparently baseless accusations of actions that would be a gross indecency offense pretty much anywhere.
She could have walked it back very easily & still made her point, but chose not to.
Move follows news that US secretary of state Marco Rubio would not attend
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/apr/23/russia-ukraine-war-live-london-peace-talks-macron-starmer-zelenskyy-putin-latest-news-updates
..David Lammy had been expecting to host a fresh round of Ukraine peace talks in London today, bringing together the US, Ukraine and Europe and so maintain relationships between traditional allies even as direct US-Russia talks to end the Ukraine war continue.
But the British minister has been embarrassed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s sudden decision late on Tuesday not to turn up and a rising chorus of leaks apparently from the US and Russia designed to derail the discussions and to promote the idea that the most significant discussions are those taking place directly between Washington and Moscow...
The US is effectively trying to surrender Ukraine's sovereignty.
I note Dura is spinning that as "nowhere near enough for VVP". If that is truly the case, then there's little to talk about.
The Greens haven't read Starmer's guidebook, let alone Machiavelli's.
And actually the court did not determine that. The court determined that trans women can be women's spaces and it also determined but much less noted that trans men can be excluded from women's spaces too. See this from a commissioner for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Undoubtedly this creates a double bind for trans people, and lawful solutions that preserve dignity and enable the full participation of trans people in public life must be found. An obvious one is to provide additional mixed-sex spaces alongside single-sex ones.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/f89ecc90-d81e-4f92-967b-8b6309cbb65f?shareToken=89a05676716e9d9c97242f0bbde7bbd2
Hence the need for third spaces such as gender-neutral alternatives to be provided on top of single sex provisions.
Given your argument that trans men make women unsafe, and given you argued the other day "change somewhere else" is an option, presumably excluding both trans males (with surgery) and trans women from women's spaces will make women more safe. While having what you've personally proposed as an alternative of "change somewhere else" available for trans people too.
Leaving everyone with a safe and dignified option. What's not to like?
I am quite sympathetic towards the government, but I'm also increasingly concerned that they really aren't up to the job.
https://x.com/WarMonitor3/status/1914973666548363651
I'm not sure "giving Russia most of what it wants (for the moment) counts as either clear or fair.
Do you think its acceptable to be showing a penis in a woman's changing room?
Why is Cyclefree in the wrong? Check your privilege.
In an office or hospital environment where the same people work together there is more potential for social policing. In more open places I would expect a shift to unisex facilities. In practice many people don't like to change in front of other people even of the same sex.
First they have Maggie Chapman saying that she has nothing to apologise for.
Immediately underneath they have a quote from the superb American writer George V Higgins:
"Life is hard. It's a whole lot harder if you're stupid."
The word “erect” sexualises this act in a fundamental way. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what else to say.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-14635345/The-50-greatest-British-cars-time-ranked-experts-YOU-agree-winner.html
And I have no desire to spend any more time browsing websites on this subject matter to discern whether there are reports of an erect penis or not. The report I read was that an athlete complained about seeing the penis and didn't want to discuss it any further, which is quite frankly enough for me and shame on you if its not enough for you.
The fact is it's not a yes/no unless you're on the extremes of the debate. The SC ruling means it's a no ... for the purposes of the EA 2010. But the GRR 2004 is still on the statute book and s9 of that says the following:
Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).
That's more like a yes.
So it's a yes and a no, and also a mostly and a sometimes and a both and a neither. Rejecting the simple yes/no answer isn't a sign of confusion or slipperiness. It's a perfectly valid thing to do.
It might have seen HS2 completed, had it been in place a decade or so back.
NEW: The Planning and Infrastructure bill will abolish the legal requirement to consult before submitting a planning application for major infrastructure projects.
My take: This is a big shift. Consultation is good in theory, but it has become a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise.
Developers are over-consulting in response to frequent (and in my view, disingenous) complaints from councils that they haven't been 'adequately consulted'.
This reform will slash years off planning tables...
https://x.com/Sam_Dumitriu/status/1914983393818775918
I'm not saying that the old way was perfect but the new regime is worse for cis women, trans women and trans men.
I had money on that: I may have mentioned it...
If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space.
Clean and simple.
There is a perfectly reasonable alternative for trans people of change somewhere else, eg gender-neutral facilities and stay out of single-sex facilities.
Not on the British list, but which I have had were:
Austin A40 (my first car, leaked like a sieve and started with a starting handle, but I loved it)
Granada Ghia
Rover 800 (hopeless)
On the list which I have had:
At 47 Vauxhall Viva (my second car)
At 42 AC Cobra (but a replica obviously)
At 20 Ford Sierra (3 of them of which the GTi was the only nice one)
Two that I would like are at 9 the GT40 (again I can only afford a replica obviously) and the DB5 obviously.
They have removed all of the gents and replaced them with women’s toilets plus a sign saying “inclusive”. Fortunately that includes men as well.
Which isn't quite the same as "If you have, either now or have ever had, a penis then do not enter a woman's-only space."
But the point made by Freedman remains valid. The OBR's estimates continuously prove to be seriously unreliable. Restricting what we can spend now on the basis of where they think we will be in 5 years time is frankly laughable. In fairness to them it was Hunt that came up with this nonsense of debt falling in 5 years time and Reeves who kept it for her own purposes.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/f89ecc90-d81e-4f92-967b-8b6309cbb65f?shareToken=89a05676716e9d9c97242f0bbde7bbd2
In fact, the judgment says that the Equality Act allows trans men (biological females) to be excluded from the women’s facilities, and trans women (biological males) to be excluded from the men’s. This might happen if, for example, a trans person looks so much like a person of the opposite biological sex that it would be disruptive to accommodate them in the single-sex service.
Undoubtedly this creates a double bind for trans people, and lawful solutions that preserve dignity and enable the full participation of trans people in public life must be found. An obvious one is to provide additional mixed-sex spaces alongside single-sex ones.
Debt falling is five years away, and it always will be.
In the past four months, Russia has taken vast casualties, in return for going nowhere. The Europeans are ramping up military production, and the oil price has plunged. Yet, for some reason, he thinks he can be awarded political and territorial gains that he has been unable to win on the battlefield.
I have.
Of course, most trans women are not a threat, just as most men are not a threat. But we cannot ignore the fact that allowing biological males into women-only spaces compromises women's safety.
A line that simply says if you have, or have ever had, a penis you are not allowed in women's spaces would not put any cis women on the wrong side and would be a lot safer for women than allowing trans women in.