[Tubby Isaacs]

Or Katherine Parkinson doesn't really know the full Rowling, and just thinks she defended single sex spaces and women's sport. Lots of people have that view of Rowling, including some actors, no doubt.

I'm not at the sharp end, so easy for me to say, but I'd be wary of being too critical of her.

[davidjay]

Or Katherine Parkinson doesn't really know the full Rowling, and just thinks she defended single sex spaces and women's sport. Lots of people have that view of Rowling, including some actors, no doubt.

I'm not at the sharp end, so easy for me to say, but I'd be wary of being too critical of her.

That's probably closer to what I meant. I wouldn't have thought many actors know the full depth of their writers' beliefs and unless I'm mistaken the IT Crowd ended well before Linehan went Full Linehan.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah, I think the IT Crowd is a complete red herring.

I can see why people would be disappointed by Parkinson's attitude, and want to put it to keep putting it to her that her attitude isn't helpful, but maybe avoid the implication she's a concentration camp guard. I should repeat I'm not at the sharp end, so it's easy for me to be "generous" like this.

[The Weeping Angel]

I don't think doctors should deliberately alter medical records to get a colleague suspended.

[Crabcakes]

Yeah, I don’t think anyone is coming out of this one covered in glory…

https://bsky.app/profile/woodo.bsky.soc ... 2dljmsj22j

[Crabcakes]

A post by the ever excellent Ian Dunt - I would recommend reading the substack article first, then the Bluesky comments, and then - should you be able to face them - the comments on the article itself.

It becomes very obvious very quickly, that the substack article - itself an entirely balanced, fair and unhysterical piece about the questionable process the legislation is going through and the unworkable scenarios it will create if passed - has indeed been shared and pounced on.

As has been agreed previously here, there are bad actors on both sides, so I don’t offer this up as some sort of “yeah, but look at all these awful TERFs” kind of thing. I’d just say compare and contrast the Bluesky comments with people saying their trans relatives have been met with nothing but kindness and understanding with the (in some cases literal) demands in the substack article comments to make it law that trans people do not exist at best, and at worst that they are all mentally ill and/or perverts.

[Crabcakes]

This is Rowling either wilfully or through ignorance completely misrepresenting a situation to make a fuss about nothing. And to be clear, M&S have been absolutely shit on this too - no apology was needed. The offer of help was to direct the customer to the right department. Nothing more.

[davidjay]

The comments in that one make me think there may be hope for humanity after all.

[Abernathy]

A good take on this in The Indie :


https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/m- ... h-8w-Wk_hw

[Crabcakes]

The ultimate irony of course is that if there was one person who would wholly empathise with the awkwardness of buying a first bra, it would be a trans woman*

*if indeed the staff member even was a trans woman - all we really know about her is that her “crime” appears to have been she was quite tall

[Crabcakes]

Toilet police latest:



Clearly this is utterly unworkable on any level, but as far as I can see the quoted content is an entirely serious post. So that’s where we’re at now - using what’s arguably a misinterpretation of a SC ruling based on current law (that itself exposes the inadequacy of that law) as a jumping off point for proposals so authoritarian and absurd they’d make MAGA folk jealous. And as an added bonus immediately insinuating some people would obviously commit fraud to be able to get access, just to double down on the “trans = pervert” insinuation.

Still, this would all be worth it to avoid the horror of potentially seeing a tall woman in a public loo

[The Weeping Angel]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05eedgp804o

Male rapists should "probably" lose the right to choose their gender, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

The former first minister, in an interview with ITV to mark the release of her memoir, also said she was partly to blame for the debate on gender recognition laws in Scotland losing "all sense of rationality".

Sturgeon came under intense pressure in 2023 after transgender offender Isla Bryson was remanded in a women's prison before being moved to a men's facility.

It came during a fierce debate over the proposals to make it easier for people in Scotland to change their legally-recognised sex.

In a separate BBC news podcast, to be released on Tuesday, Sturgeon also spoke of the possibility of her moving to London, saying she sometimes feels "I can't breathe freely in Scotland" because of the scrutiny she faces.

She told Newscast: "This may shock many people to hear, but I love London.

"Just for one thing and another. I'm spending a reasonable amount of time in London at the moment, so yeah. Maybe a bit of time down here and who knows."

I would add but I do remember a lot of people *trying to defend Bryson and dismiss it as no big deal.

*This isn;t aimed at anyone here.

[Crabcakes]

Bryson is a unique issue for a number of reasons:
1. It is perfectly possible that they are and have always been lying so they could avoid getting put in a male prison/be put in a female prison. There could be multiple reasons why they’d want that, but the key point is their lying (if this is indeed what they are doing)
2. It is also perfectly possible that they are genuine in their desire to transition - if so, they are both clearly a threat to women because they are a convicted sex offender but also at high risk themselves if they were in the general population of a male prison as a woman
3. Regardless of 1 or 2, their case is an exceptionally rare scenario and shouldn’t be used to justify or dispute any sort of ruling on how trans people are treated in society in general.


Defending their crime is inexcusable, but their case shouldn’t be a big deal in the sense of using it as an example of why trans people’s rights should be curtailed or the starting point of legislation development because it’s so obviously a rare scenario - it’d be like setting car insurance rates for everyone based on someone owning a Bugatti Veyron and parking it in Cracktown.

There was nothing Bryson did that wasn’t already very obviously and very seriously against the law. They identified as male when they committed their crimes, and the vast majority of sexual assault crimes are committed by men, but there are no demands for extra sanctions and restrictions on the movement and freedom of all men. And if they are genuine but had already transitioned, not being able to get a gender recognition certificate and being banned from the women’s loos in the town centre would have almost certainly had no effect on their lawbreaking but instead makes life harder for ordinary people who just want to be themselves.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Why did we bother with single sex spaces in the first place then? We didn't say "well, men are going to go in there anyway, let's not bother excluding them". I think it's impossible to argue that self-id for women's spaces wouldn't have been a major change. Bryson isn't unique by any means. Men who want to rape and sexually assault use deception where they can get away with it. Same as "Karen White" in prison, and many others who try but are rightly blocked by the Prison Service.

I fully accept that ordinary trans people's lives are made worse by what we have now. But I think the "Bryson doesn't really happen" stuff isn't going to cut it. It is a genuinely difficult issue.

[Andy McDandy]

How often do we hear the following type of exchange?

"[Situation] doesn't actually happen that often."

"Oh yeah? [Situation] happened to my mum's friend's cousin just the other day!"

For a lot of people, the anecdotal and personal outweighs the empirical and statistical. If someone's had something traumatic but unlikely happen to them, you'd be pretty tone deaf and crass to remind them that they're a statistical anomaly.

But as Crabcakes says, there are existing laws and procedures that just need to be enforced or enacted. And although mental health is taken more seriously these days, we do have to acknowledge that some people are just fucked in the head.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Prisons, despite the terrible White failure, have a screening process that mostly works. But what about outside prison? Are we happy for all the other Whites to self-id their way into women's spaces? What enforcement can there actually be? Guards on women's changing rooms?

[Andy McDandy]

If a man wants to enter an M&S changing room to sexually assault a woman, there is little beyond what is already in place to stop him trying. Ditto a woman intent on assaulting another woman.

Similarly with public toilets.

All these can be dealt with either by existing systems, or magical devices called cubicles and door locks.

[Tubby Isaacs]

What about a changing room at a swimming pool or leisure centre? If women's changing rooms are like men's there's a normal door, with some cubicles and lots of people changing in open spaces.

It's wrong to think only in terms of assaults and rapes too. A man entering a women's changing rooms to ogle and upset is quite bad enough.

[Andy McDandy]

OK, what sort of security measures do you think there should be in place? And remember, whatever is put in place on the ladies will need to be duplicated on the men's, in case some FTM trans person wants to look at all the cocks and bums.

[Crabcakes]

Prisons, despite the terrible White failure, have a screening process that mostly works. But what about outside prison? Are we happy for all the other Whites to self-id their way into women's spaces? What enforcement can there actually be? Guards on women's changing rooms?

It possibly came over wrong, but my intent was to get across that - for Bryson - they are a criminal who is trans. They are not a criminal because they are trans. It’s not about pretending the case doesn’t exist, but about framing it in context and not allowing the terrible rare incident to dictate daily life in perpetuity.

We’re not looking at new legislation on single, childless women being neonatal nurses because of Lucy Letby (potentially not a great example given that case seems to have some issues, but you get the idea). We don’t - despite Farage’s best efforts - assume all immigration is bad because some immigrants are bad. We don’t ban grandads from seeing their grandkids to be on the safe side because of old men like Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile.

All I really think is, the system worked better when it was one based on trust rather than now where we have one based on essentially a legal ruling that supports paranoia and requires unworkable practices and encourages vigilantism, or further the specific decision to support the view that the ruling meant all single sex spaces must always be exclusively single sex based on male/female biological definitions rather than the one where single sex spaces on those lines could exist and not be breaking the rules.

Yes, trust is occasionally broken if that is what you rely on. But that’s the price we pay to avoid characters like Linehan who gleefully demand toilet police being seen as anything other than cranks.