Letter in @thetimes today, from some famous people, and me. Plus accompanying article. If you’re feeling inspired, please sign our petition ipetitions.com/petition/dear-… .@stonewalluk thinks that males, who fancy females, can be 'lesbians', as long as they self-ID as 'women'. It's as if a charity for the political advancement of black people decided (God forbid) that there was only 'skin colour', and started to include people with suntans.

1) Calling statisticians which follow me - What do you think about this use of stats? I could do with some help. Here's a dramatic central claim from the Women and Equalities Trans Equality inquiry Final Report, 2nd para. 'A third of trans adults attempt suicide'. 2) Here's the original report it's taken from. gires.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

Er.. yeah. I find this hard to read, partly for the sheer vitriol towards me, but also for the smug stupidity. There's no statistically significant trend of female-female violence. And even if there was, we couldn't solve it by excluding females from female spaces. Whereas....

https://twitter.com/AliciaKeyes10/status/1043931284345638913

Male violence is fact. Not all males but SOME. Why do we have single-sex spaces? Not to exclude 'cis men' ffs; to exclude males. It's a way of protecting females from sexual interest of some males. It's imperfect but it is the best available option. How else could we do it?

This is a thread about a twitter account: @LGBTLD ("LGBT Lib Dems'). The Liberal Democrats are the third main party in the UK currently. Here is the account bio. This description suggests that they are, at least partly, an account representing lesbians and gays. But if you look at the feed, you don't really find much evidence of this. The feed is almost exclusively about the rights and interests of transpeople.

One of the most terrifying things about contemporary trans activism is this: poorly understood, life-changing medical interventions, on mostly female children, are being shielded from public scrutiny in order to serve the political interests of autogynephilic adult males. To spell it out: a child who wishes to breast-bind, or remove breasts, or ‘halt puberty’ because she hates her sexed body, or because she’s gay and it’s easier to believe she’s a boy, is a totally different phenomenon than a male who gets aroused at the thought of having breasts.

More fun and games on the APA blog (edited by my no 1 fan Oseroff, a fact of no relevance I’m sure) as a fellow philosopher waxes lyrical on my moral and intellectual flaws blog.apaonline.org/2018/09/12/wom… The author says early on that many of her points are not original, and she’s absolutely right. I’ve seen them a lot, and I’m quite bored of them tbh. Eg she construed me as saying TW aren’t women, when my focus is always in fact that they aren’t members of the female sex class.

THREAD. Quite an irritating article by Professor Alex Sharpe of Keele University, this inherentlyhuman.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/fox… 2. Let's ignore that it skates over the Times and BBC-fact checked figures re percentage of sex offenders in trans prison population, as evidenced here thetimes.co.uk/article/up-to-…

1) Yesterday I tweeted that some women's organisations have lost the plot. This is the most extreme case I've seen yet.The author of this execrable video is trolling lesbians and gender critical women with complete contempt. This year, they were invited speaker at a Women's March

https://twitter.com/sargesalute/status/1035915181799424000

2) Yes, you read that right. (You may also remember Heartless as instrumental in the comments on the @BrownUniversity press release for @LisaLllittman's paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, eventually resulting in it being pulled. Happy days).

1) It pains me that so many historically admirable women's organisations have enthusiastically decentred biological females from their campaigns, on grounds of 'inclusivity'. In doing so, they immediately lose intellectual coherence and their mission gets hugely confused. 2) How are you going to maintain clarity of purpose, once you have to stop talking about female bodies & sex-based oppression, & start including male penises as part of the core mission? Immediately you can't mention half the things you're supposed to be talking to females about.

1) Here's an article by a philosopher I know and like, Katharine Jenkins. theconversation.com/can-a-woman-ha… However I am afraid I disagree (as you might expect). There's more to say but I'll limit myself here to this. 2) This is a core move: "Even if we just limited our focus to people’s bodies, we’d have lots of options: should we focus on chromosomes, or genitals, or secondary sex characteristics ..? Each of these would give us different results about who goes in which category."

Short thread: One of these period-related problems is not like the others. 1 in 10 school-age African females don't attend school during menstruation.

1) There's something so whack about thinking that (e.g.) being a female homosexual & not wanting to do dick (sorry, this is where I am now) is 'discriminatory' in a morally bad way. Let's allow there's a set of females on the planet who will never be attracted to penis. Never. 2) Their sexuality was formed in early childhood development, possibly adolescence at latest. They, to put it bluntly (again, sorry) only get their rocks off for other females - genitalia, touch, taste, smell, etc. I assume no-one is going to deny this group exists (please?)

Thread. 1) It's a big deal to get published in the journal 'Philosophy and Phenomenological Research' (PPR). Really hard to do; insane rejection rates. This year, this article appeared: 'The Epistemology of Propaganda' by Rachel McKinnon. It contains the following passage 2) One of the main focuses of this piece is ' TERF propaganda'. McKinnon claims that worries about legislation designed to remove sex protections for females are based on lying propaganda. See for instance:

Some brilliant pseudonymous investigative reporting on Medium, while progressive MSM looks the other way. Follow the money. Pots and pots and pots of money. This is not a grassroots movement. medium.com/@sue.donym1984… “According to Funders for LGBTQ Issues (FFLI), funding specifically earmarked for transgender causes began rapidly increasing in 2012; by 2016 it outstripped the funding for gay, lesbian and bisexual combined (a total of $13.2m), at a cool $22 million total in funding”

In honour of today's Touching and Highly Historically Accurate Twitter moment (TM), which in no way erases lesbians & bisexuals, I present my own - brief, but I hope, still inspiring - stroll down memory lane to visit some more heroes of the past 💛💚💜
twitter.com/i/moments/1025… Joan of Arc, world-famous Maid, one of the first ever people in the world to be burned at the stake for wearing men's clothes 💛💛🔥

1/ I've had wonderful public support from a small number of philosophers, @PiersBenn included. But I'll admit I've found it instructive to compare the comparative silence here, with the public response of philosophers to trolling Kate Manne is getting atm from Peterson supporters

https://twitter.com/PiersBenn/status/1017725753377677312

2/ I've lost count of the warm letters & emails of support I've had, and I'm grateful for every one of them. And I do understand reluctance to speak - it comes at a personal and possibly professional cost. But at some point, you have to stand up for academic principle, don't you?

Sigh. The “quote” from me in the @brightonargus today is a mash up of i) something I said last week in my interview to them , *before* the Pride protest had happened (and I’m not psychic); and ii) something I tweeted later (which I stand by) about the *London* Pride statement. It’s being presented as about the Brighton pride statement.

1/ Here's a thread, individually listing all my online writings to date on disputes between trans activists and feminists; on the silencing of complicating voices about this, both within Universities & outside them; & other related matters. Most are around under 12 minute reads. 2/ Here's the one I published first, on how my own field, academic philosophy, is largely completely avoiding sympathetic discussion of gender critical views, partly out of fear. medium.com/@kathleenstock…

1/ I see Helen Belcher played ‘what are the silly women worried about’ card on #r4today with respect to sex-segregated spaces. (To be swapped seamlessly with ‘trans women are IN TERRIBLE DANGER’). Equalities law already exists to protect women at risk! Three problems with that: 2/ A. The GRA already seems to imply legal change of ‘sex’ in places so interaction with Equalities Act is unclear, even to lawyers. B. To invoke the EA, an organisation might well have to be prepared to go to court, and few can afford either the money or the publicity..

1/ What counts as ‘trans discrimination’ or ‘trans phobia’ these days? (Very bad, presumably - so you should under no circumstances do any of these. If you do, you’re an awful person, or so we are told) 2. You shouldn’t base your sexual orientation on bodily characteristics. Lesbians and heterosexual men shouldn’t rule out penises in potential partners.

1. Are trans women female?: an opiniated thread. The question of whether trans women are women, and the question of whether they are female, are different philosophical questions. This thread is *only* about latter. I repeatedly see the claim that trans women are female. E.g.:

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2. What do we want from concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’? It seems we should have – at least - concepts that function well to allow us to categorise most humans into one or other, & give a good range of predictive results over specific areas: namely reproductive capacity & health