"We strategised that by working intensively with Scottish Prison Service to support them to include TW as W on a self-ID basis within v challenging circumstances, we wld be able to ensure that all other public services shld be able to do likewise."
James MORTON.

Prisons was seen as an easy win which set the precedent so gender identity would be the criterion of admission to single-sex services.
Deliberate. Calculated.
And here we are.

Sorry for previous typo....
FFS
(sighs....)

In the realm of athletics, biological sex differences matter.

That’s why IWF and Independent Women’s Law Center released a groundbreaking report titled, COMPETITION: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat To Women’s Sports.

Check it out:

Including these two very glaring graphs! And where Lia Thomas fits after transitioning & racing in women’s events this late year ( 2021) even though a biological male who’s been through male puberty & competed for years as a man at US state level

@CeilNoyle @HadleyFreeman

I told you, didn’t I?

Starmer has been laying traps like a badboy, all

Person on TikTok: “There’s just a huge lack of plot based adult SFF that isn’t written by dudes, the stuff written by women is all too heavily romantic and smutty”

Me: ::cracks knuckles to fire off some recs::

(But also how does this freaking coexist with the people saying “all adult SFF is so heavy and dull, that’s why I stick to YA” )

(Like y’all I am begging you to actually read the genre before you pop off about what doesn’t exist in it)

See also:

Time for my annual Books of the Year - Xmas gift suggestion thread.

These are my favourite 15 books I've read this year. Starting with non-fiction, which I've read more of this year than last, and then fiction.

1. I've got into classical music properly for the first time this year, in large part due to this wonderful history of 20th century music. Ross manages to make a technical and potentially dry topic absolutely gripping. Masterful.

2. The best biography I read this year - Sontag was a fascinating figure, brilliant but also pretty obnoxious. Also she slept with an astonishing array of people from Jasper Johns to Lucinda Childs and, somewhat incongruously, Lord Donaghue.

3. When I was recovering from a long hospital stay I needed something purely fun and enjoyable and this was it. Hard to say much new about The Beatles but Brown's book finds some new angles.

4. I've avoided most of the pandemic books - too soon - but this was one great. To be honest I'd read Michael Lewis's shopping lists if he published them. He is *the* best story teller. This book looks at a group of people who had anticipated the disaster of covid.

The data for GIDS: 138 kids were referred in 2011 and most were male.

By 2021 a complete sex ratio reversal; the clinic saw 2383 kids that year with almost 70% being female.

What happened?

The lack of concern about this from certain groups is

No
How about just no?

Every word worth reading

Best retellings or explanations of Greek myths please, for adults?

Today work starts on my next book - KINGS & QUEENS. It will include all English monarchs since Alfred the Great in 886AD, of which there are 61 + Oliver Cromwell, who will also get a chapter. I've already started recruiting writers, but am open to suggestions.

@dutchgymnerd @vladagelyalisty And she has also Nemov's Show to attend, luckly for her it was postponed to December.

Amid all the talk by the Chancellor about the Brexit dividends, one could forget that the OBR has updated its assessment of the economic impacts of Brexit:

1) Import and export intensity reduced by Brexit, consistent with the OBR's 2016 assumption of a 15% reduction in each

2) Trade volumes down, estimated 15% lower than had we stayed in the EU

(The OBR cites the analysis that @JohnSpringford has done isolating the effects of Brexit)

3) The OBR notes (rightly) that, because the UK-EU TCA is yet to be fully implemented, trade barriers will "rise further" and "probably take several years to come through"

4) Most importantly, the OBR claims that Brexit will lead to a 4% reduction in long-run potential productivity.

In other words, Brexit will have made the UK poorer by 4% in the long run.

Why Rishi Sunak was wrong to call today’s public spending increase “the largest this century”.

It’s not even in the top five.

I wrote a comment piece (so my view not the Guardian's). About the escalating attacks on women whose ideas don't conform to the current gender orthodoxy 1/2

A year ago I wrote this other piece tracing some of the divisions in feminist thinking about sex, gender, bodies and minds 2/2

First training session!

Looks like they were expecting Senoh equipment not Taishan? Pray for my girls

Yup, they were surprised it’s not Senoh equipment