Gender Discussion #86

[Flibbertigibbet]

On the subject of ‘open letters’, I’m bitterly disappointed by some of the names on this

An Open Letter of solidarity to the trans community from the UK Music…

archived 3 May 2025 11:10:15 UTC

archive.ph

I'm disappointed too, but remember we have Róisín Murphy on our side.

 

[Ladida90]

Does anyone know how to find out if shops are going to be enduring single sex changing rooms and toilets? I’ve trawled through some websites such as John Lewis, M&S, Tesco etc but can’t find a thing regarding the SC ruling. Is it a case of emailing each one? I have a horrid feeling they will just ignore it unless they are sued.

Just last week I was in Zara. A man who tried to enter the women’s changing room was politely shown out. I think he was just trying to use that one because the men's was full.

 

[Mugglewump]

You couldn’t make this tit up no wonder the aliens won’t land. I a woman who suffered I am offended by this.

I keep seeing them say that women with PCOS look like men.
No, they bleeping font

Himdia is now saying that he's been using the ladies loos since he was 14. He didn't start to transition until he was 50, the lying hole.

Ewww that just makes him really creepy, well, creepier than we already knew.

 

[Mugglewump]

I'm disappointed too, but remember we have Róisín Murphy on our side.

I went to see her last year, v Terfy concert and she was brilliant

 

[IcanSpellBéchamel]

Folllowing on from this Telegraph article about the police making decisions about strip-searches on a case by case basis https://archive.is/Lsa7v and that Surrey, Merseyside, Northumbria and Sussex police police forces have indicated that they intend to flout the law by allowing trans officers to strip-search detainees of the opposite sex, I have written a letter to my local Police & Crime Commissioner. I tried using the contact form on the local PCC website but it doesn't work

If anyone wants to contact their local PCC to ask them to remind their local police force that the law is clear; intimate and strip-searches may only be performed by an officer of the same sex as the detainee, feel free to copy/paste my letter and edit it to suit your local force.

Rachel Swann, Chief Constable of Derbyshire Constabulary, is quoted in a Daily Telegraph article dated 03/05/2025 as saying that she will not rush her response to the recent Supreme Court ruling and that "forces should make decisions [about strip-searches by trans officers] on a case-by-case basis”

Whether Ms Swann was speaking in her capacity as diversity lead of the NPCC or in her capacity as Chief Constable of Derbyshire Constabulary is immaterial; UK law states that detainees can only be strip searched or have intimate searches conducted by officers of the same biological sex as themselves.

Please would you remind [the Chief Constable of your local police force] that the law is clear and was clear even before the Supreme Court ruling; strip-searches may not be carried out by officers of the opposite sex to the detainee as laid out in PACE 1984 , and that sex means biological sex wherever it is mentioned in law.

Therefore, it is not open to Ms Swann, the NPCC, the [local] Chief Constable or any police officer to make decisions about strip searches by trans officers on a "case-by-case basis".

I trust that you, as Police and Crime Commissioner, will take any action necessary to ensure that [your local police force] do not breach the law by allowing officers to conduct intimate searches or strip-searches of detainees of the opposite sex, and will remind the Chief Constable that [she or he] and the Constabulary must follow the law in this.

 

[chizontiz]

A few years old but still good

This speech by Leeds Counsilor Sarah Fields (UK) from 2020 is still the most succinct and comprehensive statement on the harms of gender ideology I've seen to date. If you don't understand what all the fuss is about, it's worth your time to read it.

"Good afternoon everyone and welcome.

Firstly I’d like to thank everyone here for coming today, our panel and the Leeds Spinners for inviting me to Chair.

Our brilliant panel of academics will be speaking today about the Declaration of Sex Based Rights. But by way of introduction, I am going to talk a little bit about Leeds and why I’m here.

....About three years ago, not long after I was first elected, I was contacted by a woman in Leeds, for advice. Her six-year-old daughter had been verbally attacked and then subjected to a violent outburst by a 17-year-old male who had been allowed to join a local girls group as a helper. This was because he said he identified as a female. What had this child done? She had asked him if he was a boy. And then this six-year-old girl had been made to stand alone in front of the entire group and apologise to him.

And I couldn’t get my head around this. So I began to do some research. And this was how I found my way to gender critical thinking and radical feminism.
And these are the following statements I’d like to make:

Every single person on the planet is unique. And I don’t care what they wear. And I don’t care who they love or have sex with, as long as they are consenting adults.

There is no such thing as living as a woman. We are women. And it is our female biology which makes us women. It is our sex. And biological sex is observable in every single cell in our bodies: it is a physical, material and biological fact. And our sex is what makes us a class. Our sex which makes us uniquely vulnerable to male violence. Our sex which means we bear the entire burden of reproductive labour. The structural oppression which women face as a class is because of their sex. And that is why all women need legal recourse to separate and sex-segregated spaces.

It is simply not ethical to categorise males as females based on their subjective feelings. To do so means the female sex no longer has legal protections or legal meaning and is instead reduced to destructive, regressive gender stereotyping.

If you cannot define women, then you cannot defend them.

Which brings me to Leeds City Council, which famously prevented a meeting here last year to discuss changes to the Gender Recognition Act. When the WPUK meeting was cancelled I read the email from a Labour Councillor and then I read the flurry of replies and actions that not once asked for clarification or any other viewpoints - just this blind acceptance of a hateful narrative – and it became clear to me that it’s become a virtue to dismiss, intimidate and silence women.

That meeting was to discuss proposed changes to legislation and the government’s consultation. Its purpose was not to tell Trans people what is best for them, but to tell politicians and lawmakers what is best for women. The vast majority of those who ask questions about Self-ID are lifelong left-leaning lesbians, trade unionists, LGB allies and of all faiths and none. These accusations we face - transphobes, bigots, TERFs, religious fundamentalists, hate preachers - are utter nonsense. And I’ve had enough.

And I must say I absolutely refute in the strongest terms any accusations of homophobia against gender critical women. A huge number of them are lesbians. And I stand with my lesbian sisters. Just as I’ve always done for years of solidarity with the LGB community. And since the woke brigade of word salad identity politics seems to love a good cliché, I’ll throw in a mention of my magnificent gay best friend and godfather to both my children.

Leeds City Council has brought in Self-Identification. Anyone can change their sex, or “gender marker” as they call it, across all council services and departments by completing a short online form.

When I asked, under FOI, for the Equality Impact Assessments I was told they didn’t do any. When I asked, under FOI, how this might impact sex-segregated services and spaces I was told Leeds City Council does not have any such spaces or services. When I asked, under FOI, for a comprehensive list of women’s and men’s clothes, as cross-dressing is specifically defined in council policy as a protected characteristic, I was told no such list exists. When asked to define a woman, they said no such definition exists.

So to be clear: men in this city can access a woman’s changing facility, toilet, leisure facility or support group or service – anywhere they are vulnerable, traumatised, undressed or asleep - because men might at some point feel like they are something which the council says is indefinable, but might mean he once wore something which may or may not be something a woman might also wear.

Well, women fought for those spaces and they are not this council’s to give away.

It is absurd, it is dangerous and millions of women across the country are saying we have had enough. You cannot identify into an oppressed class because you cannot identify out of an oppressed class. And women are uniquely oppressed across the planet: reproductive health and autonomy, Female Genital Mutilation, violence, grape, child marriage, no right to vote, death in childbirth, post-natal illness, denied access to education, lower wages, chemical contraception, sex trafficking, surrogacy, pornography, prostitution and objectification.

I’ve had women in prisons and post-prison services in Leeds who have contacted me in fear and despair because they are confined with men who threaten them with grape, assault them, repeatedly expose their so called female penises and taunt them about playing the system and flushing their hormones down the toilet.

Our statistics will be skewed and we will lose a tool of analysis that provides us with the ability to challenge the very inequalities for which sex-based provisions and quotas were created.

And of course, there is a wider underbelly of misogyny in Leeds. The so-called managed zone of prostituted, emaciated and addicted women is our flagship. In the last few months I’ve visited Holbeck twice, once at night where I observed several men out on the street openly watching pornography in their cars as women stumbled to them to be used and discarded for a fiver. During the day I was approached by punters three times in 10 minutes while simply standing by a car for some fresh air at 2pm. We are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds so men can buy the addicted bodies of the most vulnerable women in the city. Men know what a woman is in Holbeck.

I’m often asked how I would feel if I was born in the wrong body. And I say, I’ve been feeling like that every single day for as long as I can remember. You only have to go into a shop, turn on the TV, open a magazine, click on the internet and women are assaulted with GET A BIKINI BODY, 12 WEEKS UNTIL YOUR CHRISTMAS PARTY BODY, GET THE BODY YOU DREAM OF, THE BODY OF SOMEONE 20 YEARS YOUNGER, THE BODY YOU DESERVE. Botox, surgery, hair removal, Photoshop, permanent makeup, designer tina. We get it.

I don’t think all men are rapists. I don’t think all men are intrinsically violent, creepy or degenerate. God knows, I love my dad and my brother and my dear nine-year-old son. But 98% of sexual violence is committed by men. And there is no way to tell the good ones from the bad ones. There never will be. That’s why we need our spaces and services and boundaries, for our privacy, our dignity and our safety. It’s why we need to preserve the social norms which generally prevent men from entering our spaces and preserve our confidence to challenge men who do so. Bad men will do anything to gain access to women and girls. That’s why every institution in the world attracts those who will use power and access to abuse us. If they do it in schools, the care system, churches and families then they will sure as hell do it in prisons, toilets, refuges and changing rooms. They already are.

In terms of protecting females from a significant minority of dangerous males, these reasons don’t cease to operate when males self-identify as women. And self-identification removes any gatekeeping, safeguarding or requirement for any man to do anything other than complete a cursory administrative process via an online form.

I’m truly sorry for any man who feels imprisoned and tortured by masculinity. But that is something for men to deconstruct, to dismantle and to overthrow. And there are men doing it. There are transsexuals and crossdressers and allies against the male stereotypes which damage everyone. But it is not the moral duty of women to facilitate that. If your feminism prioritises the internal identifications of men over the material conditions of women then you are not a feminist. In a world of structural and systematic oppression, and an epidemic of male violence, we owe it to women and to the legacy of every feminist who has fought before us, to stand for ourselves.

Thank you."

why am I in tears reading this

 

[JAR21]

A few years old but still good

This speech by Leeds Counsilor Sarah Fields (UK) from 2020 is still the most succinct and comprehensive statement on the harms of gender ideology I've seen to date. If you don't understand what all the fuss is about, it's worth your time to read it.

"Good afternoon everyone and welcome.

Firstly I’d like to thank everyone here for coming today, our panel and the Leeds Spinners for inviting me to Chair.

Our brilliant panel of academics will be speaking today about the Declaration of Sex Based Rights. But by way of introduction, I am going to talk a little bit about Leeds and why I’m here.

....About three years ago, not long after I was first elected, I was contacted by a woman in Leeds, for advice. Her six-year-old daughter had been verbally attacked and then subjected to a violent outburst by a 17-year-old male who had been allowed to join a local girls group as a helper. This was because he said he identified as a female. What had this child done? She had asked him if he was a boy. And then this six-year-old girl had been made to stand alone in front of the entire group and apologise to him.

And I couldn’t get my head around this. So I began to do some research. And this was how I found my way to gender critical thinking and radical feminism.
And these are the following statements I’d like to make:

Every single person on the planet is unique. And I don’t care what they wear. And I don’t care who they love or have sex with, as long as they are consenting adults.

There is no such thing as living as a woman. We are women. And it is our female biology which makes us women. It is our sex. And biological sex is observable in every single cell in our bodies: it is a physical, material and biological fact. And our sex is what makes us a class. Our sex which makes us uniquely vulnerable to male violence. Our sex which means we bear the entire burden of reproductive labour. The structural oppression which women face as a class is because of their sex. And that is why all women need legal recourse to separate and sex-segregated spaces.

It is simply not ethical to categorise males as females based on their subjective feelings. To do so means the female sex no longer has legal protections or legal meaning and is instead reduced to destructive, regressive gender stereotyping.

If you cannot define women, then you cannot defend them.

Which brings me to Leeds City Council, which famously prevented a meeting here last year to discuss changes to the Gender Recognition Act. When the WPUK meeting was cancelled I read the email from a Labour Councillor and then I read the flurry of replies and actions that not once asked for clarification or any other viewpoints - just this blind acceptance of a hateful narrative – and it became clear to me that it’s become a virtue to dismiss, intimidate and silence women.

That meeting was to discuss proposed changes to legislation and the government’s consultation. Its purpose was not to tell Trans people what is best for them, but to tell politicians and lawmakers what is best for women. The vast majority of those who ask questions about Self-ID are lifelong left-leaning lesbians, trade unionists, LGB allies and of all faiths and none. These accusations we face - transphobes, bigots, TERFs, religious fundamentalists, hate preachers - are utter nonsense. And I’ve had enough.

And I must say I absolutely refute in the strongest terms any accusations of homophobia against gender critical women. A huge number of them are lesbians. And I stand with my lesbian sisters. Just as I’ve always done for years of solidarity with the LGB community. And since the woke brigade of word salad identity politics seems to love a good cliché, I’ll throw in a mention of my magnificent gay best friend and godfather to both my children.

Leeds City Council has brought in Self-Identification. Anyone can change their sex, or “gender marker” as they call it, across all council services and departments by completing a short online form.

When I asked, under FOI, for the Equality Impact Assessments I was told they didn’t do any. When I asked, under FOI, how this might impact sex-segregated services and spaces I was told Leeds City Council does not have any such spaces or services. When I asked, under FOI, for a comprehensive list of women’s and men’s clothes, as cross-dressing is specifically defined in council policy as a protected characteristic, I was told no such list exists. When asked to define a woman, they said no such definition exists.

So to be clear: men in this city can access a woman’s changing facility, toilet, leisure facility or support group or service – anywhere they are vulnerable, traumatised, undressed or asleep - because men might at some point feel like they are something which the council says is indefinable, but might mean he once wore something which may or may not be something a woman might also wear.

Well, women fought for those spaces and they are not this council’s to give away.

It is absurd, it is dangerous and millions of women across the country are saying we have had enough. You cannot identify into an oppressed class because you cannot identify out of an oppressed class. And women are uniquely oppressed across the planet: reproductive health and autonomy, Female Genital Mutilation, violence, grape, child marriage, no right to vote, death in childbirth, post-natal illness, denied access to education, lower wages, chemical contraception, sex trafficking, surrogacy, pornography, prostitution and objectification.

I’ve had women in prisons and post-prison services in Leeds who have contacted me in fear and despair because they are confined with men who threaten them with grape, assault them, repeatedly expose their so called female penises and taunt them about playing the system and flushing their hormones down the toilet.

Our statistics will be skewed and we will lose a tool of analysis that provides us with the ability to challenge the very inequalities for which sex-based provisions and quotas were created.

And of course, there is a wider underbelly of misogyny in Leeds. The so-called managed zone of prostituted, emaciated and addicted women is our flagship. In the last few months I’ve visited Holbeck twice, once at night where I observed several men out on the street openly watching pornography in their cars as women stumbled to them to be used and discarded for a fiver. During the day I was approached by punters three times in 10 minutes while simply standing by a car for some fresh air at 2pm. We are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds so men can buy the addicted bodies of the most vulnerable women in the city. Men know what a woman is in Holbeck.

I’m often asked how I would feel if I was born in the wrong body. And I say, I’ve been feeling like that every single day for as long as I can remember. You only have to go into a shop, turn on the TV, open a magazine, click on the internet and women are assaulted with GET A BIKINI BODY, 12 WEEKS UNTIL YOUR CHRISTMAS PARTY BODY, GET THE BODY YOU DREAM OF, THE BODY OF SOMEONE 20 YEARS YOUNGER, THE BODY YOU DESERVE. Botox, surgery, hair removal, Photoshop, permanent makeup, designer tina. We get it.

I don’t think all men are rapists. I don’t think all men are intrinsically violent, creepy or degenerate. God knows, I love my dad and my brother and my dear nine-year-old son. But 98% of sexual violence is committed by men. And there is no way to tell the good ones from the bad ones. There never will be. That’s why we need our spaces and services and boundaries, for our privacy, our dignity and our safety. It’s why we need to preserve the social norms which generally prevent men from entering our spaces and preserve our confidence to challenge men who do so. Bad men will do anything to gain access to women and girls. That’s why every institution in the world attracts those who will use power and access to abuse us. If they do it in schools, the care system, churches and families then they will sure as hell do it in prisons, toilets, refuges and changing rooms. They already are.

In terms of protecting females from a significant minority of dangerous males, these reasons don’t cease to operate when males self-identify as women. And self-identification removes any gatekeeping, safeguarding or requirement for any man to do anything other than complete a cursory administrative process via an online form.

I’m truly sorry for any man who feels imprisoned and tortured by masculinity. But that is something for men to deconstruct, to dismantle and to overthrow. And there are men doing it. There are transsexuals and crossdressers and allies against the male stereotypes which damage everyone. But it is not the moral duty of women to facilitate that. If your feminism prioritises the internal identifications of men over the material conditions of women then you are not a feminist. In a world of structural and systematic oppression, and an epidemic of male violence, we owe it to women and to the legacy of every feminist who has fought before us, to stand for ourselves.

Thank you."

What an excellent speech. I'll save it in the Wiki.

 

[IcanSpellBéchamel]

Holy motherforking shirtballs. Give me a minute, I'll screenshot the posts for those not on X

 

[Piff paff puff]

Don't think this has been posted (apologies if it has).

View attachment 3543308

Blah blah blah WE HATE WOMEN.

 

[Vanelope]

There seem to be so many from the north east on here I often wonder if I could have a tattler living next door.
Thanks for the heads up about The Cluny, will avoid, although it's been many years since I was that sociable. Think the last time I was there was to see Nick Harper.

I missed that - who from the Cluny signed? I love that pub

 

[MaineCoonMama]

Whoever thought up the acronym FART must be a really funny guy.

bleeping wankers.

 

[Funny_bunny]

Himdia is now saying that he's been using the ladies loos since he was 14. He didn't start to transition until he was 50, the lying hole.

IF this is true, them Himdia is creepier than we thought. He was male back then, and guess what, he’s still male now. A 14 year old boy creeping about in women’s toilets is just so wrong. How to say that you’re a pervy weirdo, without saying you’re a pervy weirdo.

The letter @Peachsquish posted is absolutely brilliant.

 

[Metropolis]

Folllowing on from this Telegraph article about the police making decisions about strip-searches on a case by case basis https://archive.is/Lsa7v and that Surrey, Merseyside, Northumbria and Sussex police police forces have indicated that they intend to flout the law by allowing trans officers to strip-search detainees of the opposite sex, I have written a letter to my local Police & Crime Commissioner. I tried using the contact form on the local PCC website but it doesn't work

If anyone wants to contact their local PCC to ask them to remind their local police force that the law is clear; intimate and strip-searches may only be performed by an officer of the same sex as the detainee, feel free to copy/paste my letter and edit it to suit your local force.

The Surrey PCC has got stick in the past for being a Terf

Statement regarding the Commissioner’s views on gender and the Stonewall organisation - Office of the Police & Crime Commissioner for Surrey

The Commissioner said she felt compelled to speak out on behalf of the women in Surrey who have contacted her.

www.surrey-pcc.gov.uk

 

[ShopTilYouSlop]

Doing a great job to reassure us after Sarah Everard, aren't they? What's wrong with these misogynistic people?

Love you, JKR.

 

[Metropolis]

I'm disappointed too, but remember we have Róisín Murphy on our side.

And Morrissey

 

[Flibbertigibbet]

And Morrissey

And Alison Moyet

 

[Moon Face]

The

They’ve had that for a while after there were several incidents involving voyerism in various stores. They clarified in 2024 that it meant anyone who identifies as a women. Shitbags that they are.

Edited to add, middle aged women make 93% of household spending decisions so why companies risk pissing us off I don’t know. We should boycott all shops, including on line, for a week. Make them buck their ideas up!

I was in Primark yesterday with my young teenage daughter, she will only go in the women's changing room, but still wants me with her, hanging around outside the door. They were fairly busy, and at one point a young individual went to walk in, now I am rubbish at correctly sexing people, but if I had to I would have said TiM. The woman from the desk went "You need to be in the All Genders" to which the individual remarked "I am a woman" Quick as a flash the assistant replied "Well it's full in there" and so little individual went off to the All Genders.

She was an older woman, with a no nonsense look about her, so maybe some subtle gatekeeping going on. She had told the two woman in front of us that she only had All Genders available, but had obviously heard my daughter say she'd rather wait, and suddenly said "ooh I have got one"

We need people like her on the desk who won't take any silly business.

 

[ThisIsMyGuiltyPleasure]

One of the comments on the India Willoughby tweet called him a man who brushes his hair with a balloon and it really tickled me...

 

[Mismatched Pegs]

I missed that - who from the Cluny signed? I love that pub

If I remember rightly it was the venue manager (can't remember the name though) I rarely go now but old man Pegs goes to loads of gigs so is there quite regularly.

 

[CariettaWhite]

Lorraine 'super, absolutely lovely, oooh you lovely wee thing' Kelly, espousing the same old bull today; 'just be kind'. Yes, Loz, be kind to the men chairing grape crisis centres telling women to 'reframe their trauma', be kind to the men in masks holding placards gleefully saying that the best terfs are 'dead terfs'. Be kind to India Willoughby who tweets hatred about the murderer of Sarah Everard and how he is probably a role model for women's rights activists. Be kind to 55 year old Clive who has decided he is now Carol and goes into the girls changing room and showers with his erect rooster on display. Be kind to Isla Bryson, a convicted rapist who is now in a women's prison because he wants to be. I honestly think this bleep would interview Ian Huntley and say something like 'ooh, you're one of the most notorious child murderers in UK history. Well done you, absolutely super, what a lovely wee thing you are, and you look amazing, really glowing'. Absolute simpering handmaiden, an embarrassment to Scotland and the media.

She’s utterly pathetic. I loathe her.